DL4300 Appliance
Understanding Rapid Snap for Virtual
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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:
•
Agentless protection does not support protection of dynamic volumes (for example, spanned, striped, mirrored, or RAID
volumes) at the volume level. It protects them at the disk level.
•
Agentless protection does not support Live Recovery. For more information about this feature, see
.
•
After each restore of a single volume to the protected VM, you must restart the VM.
•
Agentless protection does not collect Microsoft SQL or Microsoft Exchange metadata.
•
You cannot perform a SQL attachability check, log truncation, or a mountability check on recovery points captured on
agentless protected machines.
•
Agentless protection does not collect or display volume labels, or drive letters.
•
Agentless protection does not display the actual amount of space used on a VM if the virtual disk type is thick provision
eager zeroed.
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.
•
The host machine must be running ESXi version 5.0.0 build 623860 or later.
•
The host machine must meet the minimum system requirements stated in the Rapid Recovery Installation and Upgrade
Guide.
•
For volume-level protection, VMDKs must include either Master Boot Record (MBR) partition tables or GUID partition
tables (GPTs). VMDKs without these partition tables are protected as whole disks rather than as individual volumes.
•
Each VMware virtual machine must have VMware Tools installed to ensure snapshot consistency.
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.
