Rapid Recovery 6.1.2 - Installation and Upgrade Guide

Support for dynamic and basic volumes

Rapid Recovery supports taking snapshots of all dynamic and basic volumes. Rapid Recovery also supports exporting simple dynamic volumes that are on a single physical disk. As their name implies, simple dynamic volumes are not striped, mirrored, spanned, or RAID volumes.

The behavior for virtual export of dynamic disks differs, based on whether the volume you want to export is protected by the Rapid Recovery Agent software, or is a VM using agentless protection. This is because non-simple or complex dynamic volumes have arbitrary disk geometries that cannot be fully interpreted by the Rapid Recovery Agent.

When you try to export a complex dynamic disk from a machine with the Rapid Recovery Agent software, a notification appears in the user interface to alert you that exports are limited and restricted to simple dynamic volumes. If you attempt to export anything other than a simple dynamic volume with the Rapid Recovery Agent, the export job fails.

In contrast, dynamic volumes for VMs you protect agentlessly are supported for protection, virtual export, restoring data, and BMR, and for repository storage, with some important restrictions. For example:

CAUTION: When exporting a dynamic volume that spans multiple disks, you must export the dynamic disks with the original system volumes to preserve the disk types.

Repository storage: Additionally, Rapid Recovery supports the creation of repositories on complex dynamic volumes (striped, mirrored, spanned, or RAID). The file system of the machine hosting the repository must be NTFS or ReFS.

Support for Cluster Shared Volumes

Rapid Recovery release 6.1 and later includes the Rapid Snap for Virtual feature. With the Rapid Recovery Agent installed on each node, you can protect and restore supported VMs hosted on Hyper-V cluster-shared volumes (CSVs) installed on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016.

In addition, Rapid Recovery release 6.1 and later supports virtual export to Hyper-V CSVs installed on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2016. For information about supported hypervisors, see Hypervisor requirements.

Rapid Recovery only supports protection and restore of CSV volumes running on Windows Server 2008 R2.

The following table depicts current Rapid Recovery support for cluster-shared volumes.

1 Protect includes protection, replication, rollup, mount, and archiving.

2 Restore includes file-level restore, volume-level restore, bare metal restore, and virtual export.

3 Restore includes file-level restore, volume-level restore, and bare metal restore.

Rapid Recovery Core installation requirements

Install the Rapid Recovery Core on a dedicated Windows 64-bit server. Servers should not have any other applications, roles, or features installed that are not related to Rapid Recovery. As an example, do not use the Core machine to also serve as a hypervisor host (unless the server is an appropriately sized Quest DL series backup and recovery appliance).

As another example, do not use the Core server as a high-traffic web server. If possible, do not install and run Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, or Microsoft SharePoint on the Core machine. If SQL Server is required on the Core machine – for example, if you are using Rapid Recovery DocRetriever for SharePoint – make sure you allocate more resources, in addition to those needed for efficient Core operations.

Depending on your license and your environment requirements, you may need to install multiple Cores, each on a dedicated server. Optionally, for remote management of multiple Cores, you can install the Rapid Recovery Central Management Console on a 64-bit Windows computer.

For each machine you want to protect in a Rapid Recovery Core, install the Rapid Recovery Agent software version appropriate to that machine's operating system. Optionally, you can protect virtual machines on a VMware ESXi host without installing the Rapid Recovery Agent. This agentless protection has some limitations. For more information, see the topic "Understanding Rapid Snap for Virtual" in the Rapid Recovery User Guide.

Before installing Rapid Recovery release 6.1, ensure that your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements. For additional guidance for sizing your hardware, software, memory, storage, and network requirements, see knowledge base article 185962, “Sizing Rapid Recovery Deployments.”

CAUTION: Quest does not support running the Rapid Recovery Core on Windows Core operating systems, which offer limited server roles. This includes all editions of Windows Server 2008 Core, Windows Server 2008 R2 Core, Windows Server 2012 Core, Windows Server 2012 R2 Core, and Windows Server 2016 Core. Excluding Windows Server 2008 Core, these Core edition operating systems are supported for running the Rapid Recovery Agent software.

NOTE: Quest does not recommend installing Rapid Recovery Core on an all-in-one server suite such as Microsoft Small Business Server or Microsoft Windows Server Essentials.

CAUTION: Quest does not recommend running the Rapid Recovery Core on the same physical machine that serves as the Hyper-V host. (This recommendation does not apply to Quest DL series of backup and recovery appliances.)

Rapid Recovery release 6.1 operating system installation and compatibility matrix

Microsoft Windows operating systems

Rapid Recovery Core must be installed on an appropriately sized server running a supported 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating system. The following table and notes list each Windows operating system and describes compatibility for each Rapid Recovery component or feature.

NOTE: This information is provided to educate users on compatibility. Quest does not support operating systems that have reached end of life.

Windows installation and support notes:

1 The boot CD supports bare metal restore, but does not support driver injection.

2 VM export to Azure works only for x64 editions of operating systems listed.

Linux operating systems

Linux operating systems are supported as protected machines in a Rapid Recovery Core. You can use agentless protection, or install the Rapid Recovery Agent. The following table and notes list each supported Linux operating system and distribution, and describes support for each Rapid Recovery component or feature.

Linux installation and support notes:

1 B-tree file system (BTRFS) is supported only on operating systems with kernel version 4.2. or later. Compliant operating systems currently include Ubuntu versions 14.04.4 with service pack 4 or later, and versions 15.10 or later. SLES versions 12 and 12 SP1 have older kernel versions, and so Rapid Recovery does not support their implementations of BTRFS.