This procedure includes general guidance for creating a VM in Azure to serve as your Rapid Recovery Core, and configuring the required speed, networking and compute resources. Available resources may include VM disk type, number of virtual CPUs, amount of random access memory (RAM), and performance range (measured in Input/Output Per Second, or IOPS). You may be prompted for other Azure options such as disk support type and load balancing. Because the Azure interface changes frequently, some steps may not match precisely. Conceptually, this procedure includes the following aspects:
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NOTE: The configuration options and resources you select can affect your hourly cost to operate the VM. before you click Create, you can confirm the price per hour for your selected configuration. |
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Caution: Once you enable the VM, you incur hourly charges in your Azure subscription for the duration of time that the VM is allocated. To perform regular backups or replication, the VM must be enabled and allocated. When not using your Rapid Recovery Core VM, you can de-allocate the VM, which pauses hourly billing. The VM remains associated with your subscription but does not incur hourly charges until it is allocated. |
For more information about Azure configurations and pricing, see the virtual machines pricing page on the Azure website. For links to other useful references on Microsoft websites, see Microsoft Azure documentation.
This procedure assumes you have not yet created your Core VM.
Follow this procedure to create your Rapid Recovery Core VM.
A Description pane expands on the right side, showing information about the Core VM. Optionally, read information about Rapid Recovery Core and explore the web links. Note that this VM uses the Resource Manager model.
The Create Virtual Machine pane appears, listing the 4 basic steps required for this process. To the right, the Basics pane appears, with prompts for basic information about your VM.
While basic settings available in the Azure UI may change, please note the following:
When satisfied, click OK. The Choose a size pane appears. You can search or filter to select from various VM size configurations.
Caution: Quest strongly recommends avoiding Azure's Auto-shutdown feature. Allowing Azure to shut down the VM without gracefully stopping the Rapid Recovery Core service may lead to repository corruption or data inconsistencies. |
When satisfied, click OK. Your selections are validated, and the Create pane appears.
When the VM creation and deployment is complete, the VM creation options window closes, and the Azure dashboard displays. While the VM deploys, you can see a representation of it on the desktop. When complete, a notification appears briefly, and an overview with details for your VM appears in Azure.
Next steps
Before you can use your Rapid Recovery Core VM, you must attach one or more storage disks. Proceed to the next step in the setup process, Adding storage to your Azure VM.
This procedure assumes that you have a Microsoft Azure subscription associated with a Microsoft user account, and that you have already created a Rapid Recovery Core VM in that Azure account.
The Virtual machines page appears, showing all VMs in your current Azure subscription.
The Virtual machines details pane appears, with icons at the top. Some of the actions you can perform with each VM are described in the following table.
The RDP session connects, and your Rapid Recovery Core VM desktop displays.
Next steps
For more information about the items that appear on the desktop of your VM, see Exploring your Rapid Recovery Core VM desktop
This topic describes the items you see on your Rapid Recovery Core VM before and after setup using the configuration script.
Your Rapid Recovery virtual machine uses the Windows Server 2016 Data Center operating system. Each time a virtual or physical machine using this OS starts, Windows opens the Server Manager utility. Unless you need it, you can click the X in the top right of the Server Manager window to close Server Manager.
When you first connect to your Rapid Recovery Core VM, and before you run the configuration script, four desktop shortcuts appear. After you run the configuration script, two additional items appear. These items are described in the following table. The last column in the table describes whether the desktop item appears before the configuration script is initially run.
Item Name | Description | Path | Appears Before Setup |
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Configure Rapid Recovery Core | This Windows shortcut launches a script or sequence of scripts to configure your Core. Also use each time you attach new virtual disks for repository storage for your Core. | C:\Program Files\AppRecovery\Core\ PowerShellScripts\VM_FTBU\Setup.cmd | Yes |
Core Console | This Windows shortcut to the Rapid Recovery Core Console. A sample URL is https://MyVM:8006/apprecovery/admin/ |
https://[vmname]:[port]/apprecovery/admin/ |
No |
Rapid Recovery Documentation | This Internet URL opens technical product documentation on the Quest Support website. | https://support.quest.com/rapid-recovery/6.2/technical-documents | Yes |
Rapid Recovery License Portal | This Internet URL opens the Rapid Recovery License Portal in your web browser, where you can manage Rapid Recovery licenses. | https://rapidrecovery.licenseportal.com/ | Yes |
Rapid Recovery Software Support | This Internet URL opens the Rapid Recovery Support portal for self-help tools you can use to solve problems quickly and independently, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can browse video tutorials, knowledge base articles, access user forums, start a Live Chat session, and more. When you click Contact Support from this page, you have direct access to product support engineers through an online Service Request system. | https://support.quest.com/rapid-recovery/6.2 | Yes |
Rapid Recovery 14-day trial key.lic | The first time you open the Rapid Recovery Core Console, you are prompted to associate a license key with your Core. You can use the temporary key on the desktop, or obtain a perpetual or subscription license from Quest and enter the long-term license key. | C:\Users\[username]\Desktop\ Rapid Recovery 14-day trial key.lic | No |
The first time you open your Core and associate it with a license, the Quick Start Guide appears. This is a Rapid Recovery feature that provides you with a guided flow of suggested tasks for configuring and using Rapid Recovery Core.
You are not required to perform any steps suggested by the guide. You can simply view the suggested tasks, navigating through them using the Skip Step and Back options. Optionally, to hide the guide at any point, click Exit Guide. For more information, see the topics "Understanding the Quick Start Guide" and "Hiding the Quick Start Guide" in the Rapid Recovery 6.2 User Guide.
Next steps
This procedure assumes that you have a Microsoft Azure subscription, and that you have already created a VM in Azure to use as a Rapid Recovery Core.
When you create a virtual machine from the Azure Marketplace, the VM includes only the amount of storage reserved for the operating system and Core application. From your Azure subscription, you must attach at least one additional data disk to your Core VM, which will be used as the storage location for the repository.
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Caution: The current maximum storage size for any single disk that can be purchased from the Marketplace is 1023GB (for practical purposes, in this document we refer to this as 1TB). For best results, Quest recommends that you add storage disks for working with Rapid Recovery in 1TB increments. If you need more storage for your Rapid Recovery Core, you can attach additional 1TB disks to your Azure VM. |
You can add storage to your Azure VM before you run the script to configure your Rapid Recovery Core VM, or any time afterward. Quest recommends adding storage first, for the sake of simplicity.
If you attach storage to your VM after the Core is configured, you can run the configuration script again to automatically associate that storage disk with your repository. From a Rapid Recovery perspective, additional storage disks are viewed as extents to your repository. Alternatively, you can add a new storage location to an existing Rapid Recovery DVM repository from the Core Console GUI on your VM. For more information, see the Rapid Recovery 6.2 User Guide topic "Adding a storage location to an existing repository."
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NOTE: While the precise steps or the user interface for adding storage to your Azure VM may change, the main purpose of this step is to attach at least one data disk to your replication target VM. You can also search for relevant articles in the Azure documentation center. For example, see How to attach a data disk to a Windows VM in the Azure portal. |
Perform the following procedure in your Azure subscription to attach storage to the replication target VM.
Option | Description | ||
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Name | Type an appropriate name for your storage disk.
For example, type RapidRecoveryCore_StorageVolume1. | ||
Source type | Select the appropriate disk type. | ||
Account type | Select the appropriate storage account type.
Standard disks use standard magnetic disks. Premium (SSD) disks use solid state drives and have low latency. Quest recommends using premium disks on Azure for high transfer rates or frequent replication. | ||
Size (GiB) | Enter the appropriate disk size.
Quest strongly recommends using a 1023GB disk (the current maximum for Azure).
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Storage container | Navigate through your existing storage account, locate, and select the appropriate existing storage container. Rapid Recovery uses a default container called vhds that stores virtual hard disks that are shared among all VMs. | ||
Storage blob name | Define a storage binary large object (blob) name, or leave the default name. This is the name of the virtual disk that you are attaching to the selected VM. |
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Caution: If you do not click Save, the disk configuration is not saved and the disk is not attached to your VM. |
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NOTE: After creating the virtual disk, Quest recommends waiting 2 to 5 minutes before running the configuration script, to ensure the storage resources are discoverable. |
Next steps
Proceed to the next step in the setup process, Running the Core configuration script from the VM desktop.
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