Rapid Recovery 6.1.2 - User Guide

Supported applications and cluster types

To protect your cluster properly, you must have installed the Rapid Recovery Agent software on each of the machines or nodes in the cluster. Rapid Recovery supports the application versions and cluster configurations listed in the following table.

The supported disk types include:

The supported mount types include:

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 .

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.

Support for Cluster Shared Volumes

To protect your cluster properly, you must have installed the Rapid Recovery Agent software on each of the machines or nodes in the cluster. Rapid Recovery supports the application versions and cluster configurations listed in the following table.

The supported disk types include:

The supported mount types include:

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 .

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.

Understanding Rapid Snap for Virtual

By installing the Rapid Recovery Agent software, you can protect physical or virtual machines on the Rapid Recovery Core. The supported operating systems are indicated in system requirements in the topic Rapid Recovery Agent software requirements.

Rapid Recovery now offers another approach for protecting machines.

The Rapid Snap for Virtual feature — also known as agentless protection — of Rapid Recovery lets you protect virtual machines (VMs) on a VMware ESXi host or a Hyper-V server or host without installing the Rapid Recovery Agent on every VM.

CAUTION: Quest recommends that you limit agentless protection to no more than 200 VMs at once. For example, do not select more than 200 VMs when using the Protect Multiple Machines Wizard. Protecting more than 200 VMs results in slow performance. There is no limit to how many VMs a Core can agentlessly protect over time. For example, you could protect 200 VMs today and another 200 VMs tomorrow.

For more information, see Protecting vCenter/ESXi VMs and Protecting Hyper-V servers and clusters.

Protecting vCenter/ESXi VMs

Rapid Recovery lets you protect vCenter/ESXi VMs without installing the Rapid Recovery Agent on the VM or ESXi host, achieving agentless protection. To protect an ESXi environment, the Rapid Recovery Core works with the snapshot technology native to VMware.

Rapid Recovery agentless protection uses the ESXi client and the existing application program interface (API) to protect selected VMs on a single host without installing Rapid Recovery Agent software. The Rapid Recovery Core then communicates with the virtual machine disk (VMDK) to determine the necessary details of the protected volumes. Because Rapid Recovery creates recovery points based on volumes, not VMDKs, each volume can be separately mounted, restored, and exported.

NOTE: Rapid Recovery recommends that VMware Tools be installed on virtual machines (VMs) you want to protect on vSphere or ESXi hosts. When VMware Tools are installed on a VM using a Windows operating system (OS), the backups that the Rapid Recovery Core captures use Microsoft Volume Shadow Services (VSS). For information on the behavior of agentless VMs with or without VMware Tools, see Benefits of installing VMware Tools for agentless protection.

Agentless protection also uses VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) to reduce the time needed for incremental snapshots. CBT determines which blocks changed in the VMDK file, letting Rapid Recovery back up only the portions of the disk that have changed since the last snapshot. This backup method often results in shorter backup operations and reduced resource consumption on network and storage elements.

There are multiple benefits to using agentless protection. Some of the most useful attributes include the following characteristics:

NOTE: If dynamic volumes are complex (striped, mirrored, spanned, or RAID), they export as disk images and parse into volumes after the export operation completes on the exported VM.

While there are many reasons to use agentless protection for ESXi VMs, opt for the protection method that best suits your environments and business needs. Along with the previously mentioned benefits, there are also the following considerations to keep in mind when choosing agentless protection:

If you choose to use agentless protection for your ESXi VMs, the host must meet the following minimum requirements for agentless protection to be successful.

Protecting Hyper-V servers and clusters

To protect a Hyper-V server agentlessly, you do not need to install the Rapid Recovery Agent on any VMs. You need only install it on the host machine or cluster node. The Agent protects the virtual hard disk on the host and converts any changes to the hard disk files to a volume image or disk image, depending on the file system. A new driver provides file-level support for VMs on hosts and on cluster shared volumes (CSVs).

NOTE: Rapid Recovery supports the VHDx disk file format. It does not support the VHD format.

For protecting VMs on a CSV, the Rapid Recovery Agent and driver must be installed on each cluster node using the auto deployment feature in the Protect Multiple Machines Wizard. From the nodes, the Agent can protect all VMs operating on CSVs by creating two types of changes for every file. The first type of change is saved only before or after a snapshot or clean system restart. The second type of change resides on the disk, which makes an incremental snapshot available even if there is a power failure or dirty shutdown. The Agent installed on the node merges all of the changes into one before transferring the data.

When a host or node is running, Rapid Recovery creates an application-consistent backup. If the host is not running, no backup can be created; however, if one of the nodes is not running, then Rapid Recovery can continue taking snapshots of the VMs on the cluster.

NOTE: For best performance, it is recommended that the maximum concurrent transfers for the Hyper-V host or node be set to 1, which is the default setting.

Agentless Hyper-V protection has many of the same capabilities as traditional protection where the Agent is installed on every VM, including:

However, there are limitations to consider when choosing agentless Hyper-V protection. Capabilities that are not performed include:

NOTE: For an application-consistent snapshot, you must have the SCSI Controller installed on each VM. Without this controller, the result is always a crash-consistent snapshot.

Benefits of installing VMware Tools for agentless protection

When protecting virtual machines (VMs) without the using Rapid Recovery Agent, Quest recommends installing VMware Tools on protected VMs on vSphere or ESXi hosts to take full advantage of Microsoft Volume Shadow Services (VSS) functionality.

Agentless protection uses the snapshot technology native to VMware to back up protected data. When VMware Tools are installed on a VM with a Windows operating system (OS), the backups that the Rapid Recovery Core captures can also use VSS. When VMware Tools are not installed, Rapid Recovery still collects snapshots, but the absence of VMware Tools can adversely affect the state of data on your protected VM.

There are two possible data states:

If you recover a transactional application from a crash-consistent state, the database returns to the last valid state. That most recent valid state may be from the time of the crash, or it may be from earlier than the crash. If it is from earlier, then the database must roll forward some work to make the data files match the information in the logs. This process takes some time when you first open the database, which causes a delay when starting up the machine.

The following conditions apply based on whether VMware Tools are installed and on the powered-on state of the VM: