A Replay agent is installed on the Windows guests. The agent is responsible for continually collecting volume block-level changes for the entire virtual machine and ensuring that the snapshots are application consistent. The block changes are transferred to the Replay server at the rate of 2GB/minutes with only a 1-2% impact on the guest while delivering 96 snapshots per day. The agent supports 2003/2008 Windows Server workloads including Exchange 2003/2007, SQL 2005/2008, Blackberry Enterprise Servers, and all Exchange and SQL role servers.

The Replay server maintains the snapshot as incremental images that are compressed and deduplicated. The compression rate is between 50-80% depending on the data formats. A retention policy can be defined to control how long then recovery points are available for recovery and historical discovery needs. The default is 1 month. If the workload is Exchange, the individual data stores are validated against data store corruption. All of the backup processing is off-loaded from the production server improving the performance of the guest.

With VMware instantiations, the images can be automatically exported and continuously maintained as VMware virtual standby environments enabling push-button workload failover directly from VMware ESX and VMware Server 2.0 supported file systems. The images can be used for V2P, P2V, V2V migrations to dissimilar hardware or for bare-metal to individual file level recoveries.

To download a free trial of AppAssure’s Replay 4 Hyper-V server backup and disaster recovery software, visit www.appassure.com.

Tags: Hyper V Backup, Hyper V Recovery, recover virtual machine, restore virtual machine, virtual server backup