Rapid Recovery 6.2 - Release Notes

Oracle Database 12c application support

Rapid Recovery release 6.2 expands application support to include Agent-based protection of Oracle 12c relational database servers. You can protect an Oracle database server and all of its databases, and perform related tasks.

In this release, the following restrictions apply:

NOTE: Oracle databases with ARCHIVELOG mode enabled must also be set to archive all online redo logs using the ARCH (archive) process. A database administrator (DBA) can change the mode and set archiving of redo logs using Oracle SQL*Plus or Oracle Enterprise Manager. For more information about enabling ARCHIVELOG mode and archiving, see Oracle documentation or consult a qualified Oracle 12c DBA.

When an Oracle database is set to archive log mode, the logs can accumulate and consume substantial disk space. For this reason, you are able to truncate Oracle logs to reclaim disk space.

Setup includes protection of the database server, entering credentials for each database in the Core Console, enabling archive log mode in the Core Console, and verifying or enabling the Oracle VSS writer. For more information about adding an Oracle server to protection and properly configuring it, see the Rapid Recovery User Guide section "About protecting Oracle database servers."

Once you install the Agent, protect the machine in your Core, and configure settings properly, you can do the following:

If you boot up a VM of an Oracle database, you may have to manually start the database services.

Graceful shutdown and restart of Core services

Invariably, a machine on which Rapid Recovery Core is running shuts down or must be rebooted. In release 6.2, Rapid Recovery Core is enhanced to improve its ability to gracefully shut down and restart Core services.

When an administrative user explicitly requests a soft reboot or shutdown of the Core server, Rapid Recovery Core delays the shutdown. During this pause, the user is notified of running Rapid Recovery tasks and can delay or cancel the shutdown. The user has the option to let specific application tasks complete, or explicitly pause or cancel tasks. If the user specified no action, Rapid Recovery automatically pauses running backup, replication, or archive tasks and terminates recovery or rollup tasks. All Core and related services are then gracefully terminated before the operating system shutdown or reboot completes.

In cases when planned maintenance of the Core server (including rebooting or restarting) is required, the Core UI now offers UI features to either restart or shut down the Core service with one click. Users receive notification when corresponding services are completely shut down. These features are accessed from the top of the Core Settings page. For more information about suspending or resuming the scheduler, see the Rapid Recovery User Guide topic "Restarting or shutting down the Core service."

On the Tasks page (reached from the Events icon), users can postpone all scheduled tasks on the Core that have not already started by clicking the Suspend Scheduler option. Only when the scheduler is suspended, you can resume task scheduling by clicking the Resume Scheduler option. You can choose to cancel running tasks, or just suspend new tasks. This feature suspends new tasks from scheduling on the Core until you explicitly resume the scheduler. For more information about suspending or resuming the scheduler, see the Rapid Recovery User Guide topic "Suspending or resuming scheduled tasks."

Supporting graceful shutdown and restart changes, threads and processes have been separated or grouped intentionally with performance in mind. Speed of recovery has been improved, in some cases dramatically. Improper Core shutdowns due to system crash, reboot, or sudden power loss are now substantially less disruptive to Core functionality.

Support for shared Hyper-V virtual hard disks (VHDX)

A Hyper-V virtual hard disk (VHDX) is a disk image file format used to create a virtual hard disk on Windows Server 2012 R2-based virtualization environments.

With this release, Rapid Recovery now supports shared VHDX on protected Hyper-V hosts running Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2016.

Support for Microsoft Scale-Out File Server with Hyper-V

Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) is a Microsoft feature that, when enabled, provides scale-out file shares that are readily accessible for file-based server application storage. With this feature, multiple nodes from the same cluster can share one folder.

Rapid Recovery can now agentlesly protect VMs on a Hyper-V cluster with disks located on a SOFS. The Rapid Recovery Agent must be installed on each of the physical cluster nodes.

Rapid Recovery support for SOFS begins with Windows Server 2012 R2.