Rapid Recovery 6.1.3 - User 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:

However, the volumes are exported at the disk level, with no volume parsing. For example, if exporting a dynamic volume spanned across two disks, the export will include two distinct disk volumes.

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.

Understanding the Rapid Recovery Agent software installer

Rapid Recovery lets you download installers from the Rapid Recovery Core. From the Downloads page, you can choose to download the Agent Installer, the Local Mount Utility (LMU), or an SNMP MIB file. For more information about the LMU, see The Local Mount Utility. For more information about SNMP, see Understanding SNMP settings.

NOTE: For access to the Agent Installer, see Downloading the Rapid Recovery Agent Installer. For more information about deploying the Agent Installer, see the Rapid Recovery Installation and Upgrade Guide.

The Agent installer is used to install the Rapid Recovery Agent application on machines that are intended to be protected by the Rapid Recovery Core. If you determine that you have a machine that requires the Agent Installer, you can download the web installer from the Downloads page of the Rapid Recovery Core Console.

NOTE: Downloading of the Core is performed from the Rapid Recovery License Portal. To download the Rapid Recovery Core installer, visit https://licenseportal.com. For more information, see the Rapid Recovery License Portal User Guide.

Downloading the Rapid Recovery Agent Installer

Download the Rapid Recovery Agent Installer and deploy it to any machine that you want to protect on the Rapid Recovery Core. Complete the steps in this procedure to download the web installer.

2.	To download the web installer from the Core, on the Core Console icon bar, click the More icon and then select Downloads.

For more information about installing the Rapid Recovery Agent software, see the Rapid Recovery Installation and Upgrade Guide.

Deploying Agent to multiple machines simultaneously from the Core Console

You can deploy the Rapid Recovery Agent software simultaneously to multiple Windows machines. The machines can be part of an Active Directory domain, a vCenter or ESXi virtual host, or a Hyper-V virtual host; or they can be machines already protected by the local Rapid Recovery Core, as in the case of a Rapid Recovery Agent software upgrade. You also have the option to manually deploy the software to machines that are not necessarily associated with a specific domain or host.

You can also manually deploy the Rapid Recovery Agent software to one or more Linux machines from the Core Console.

CAUTION: If AppAssure Agent was previously installed on a Linux machine, then before installing Rapid Recovery Agent, remove the AppAssure Agent from the machine using a shell script. For information on removing the Agent from a Linux machine, see the topic Uninstalling the AppAssure Agent software from a Linux machine. To successfully deploy the Agent software to Linux machines, see the prerequisites in the topic About installing the Agent software on Linux machines. These topics are found in the Rapid Recovery Installation and Upgrade Guide.

Deploying the Rapid Recovery Agent software does not protect the machines automatically. After deploying, you must then select the Protect Multiple Machines option from the button bar of the Core Console.

NOTE: The feature in which you deploy to multiple machines simultaneously was previously referred to as bulk deploy. The feature in which you protect multiple machines simultaneously was previously referred to as bulk protect.

To deploy and protect multiple machines simultaneously, perform the following tasks:

NOTE: If you selected the Protect Machine After Install option during deployment, skip this task.