
DL4300 Appliance
Bare metal restore for Windows machines
334
See also:
About exporting to virtual machines with Rapid Recovery
See also:
See also:
Related tasks
See also:
See also:
See also:
Restoring a directory or file using Windows Explorer
See also:
See also:
Performing a BMR from an archive
Understanding bare metal restore for
Windows machines
This section describes how to restore a protected Windows machine from bare-metal similar or dissimilar
hardware.
Parent topic
Bare metal restore for Windows machines
Servers, when operating as expected, perform the tasks they are configured to do. It is only when they fail that
things change. When a catastrophic event occurs, rendering a server inoperable, immediate steps are needed to
restore the full functionality of that machine.
Rapid Recovery provides the ability to perform a bare metal restore (BMR) for your Windows or Linux machines.
BMR is a process that restores the full software configuration for a specific system. It uses the term “bare metal”
because the restore operation recovers not only the data from the server, but also reformats the hard drive and
reinstalls the operating system and all software applications. To perform a BMR, you specify a recovery point from
a protected machine, and roll back (perform a restore) to the designated physical or virtual machine. If you are
performing a restore to a system volume, this is considered a BMR. If you are performing a restore and require a
boot CD, this is also considered a BMR. Other circumstances in which you may choose to perform a bare metal
restore include hardware upgrade or server replacement In both of these cases, you perform a restore from a
recovery point to the upgraded or replaced hardware.
Rapid Recovery supports Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 operating systems that are booted
from FAT32 EFI partitions are available for protection or recovery, as well as Resilient File System (ReFS)
volumes.
NOTE:
Bare metal restore of Storage Spaces disks configuration (a feature of Windows 8.1) is also not
supported in this release. At present, only full restore and BMR are supported as a driver limitation exists
with ReFS, so restore is implemented in user mode, VM export, and so on. If a Core is protecting at least
one agent volume that contains the ReFS file system, it should be installed on a Window 8, Windows 8.1,
Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2012 R2 machine, since these operating systems provides
native support of ReFS. Otherwise, functionality will be limited and operations that involve such things as
mounting a volume image will not work. The Rapid Recovery Core Console will present applicable error
messages in these occurrences.
Only supported Linux operating systems are available for protection or recovery. This includes Ubuntu
®
,
Red Hat
®
Enterprise Linux
®
, CentOS™, and SUSE
®
Linux Enterprise Server (SLES
®
). For details, see
the Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery Installation and Upgrade Guide.