Virtual Disaster Recovery Requirements

Before you initiate Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR), make sure both of the systems involved are supported and properly configured:

  • Source system – This is the device that has been backed up with Backup Manager and needs to be recovered
  • Host system – This is the device that the recovery software is installed on, where you want to restore the data to. It can be the same machine as the source system or a different one.

You also need to have a note of the backup device's Encryption key/Security code or have access to the Passphrase before you begin.

Device passphrases

To find the device name, passphrase etc. for automatically installed devices, please see Getting passphrases for automatically installed devices.

If you do not know the Encryption Key or Security Code for a regularly installed device, you will need to retrieve this information before progressing. This can be done by converting the device to use passphrase-based encryption. See Convert devices to passphrase-based encryption for full details.

Hyper-V & Local VHD

Cove Data Protection (Cove) has functionality for you to perform virtual disaster recoveries to Hyper-V targets. Hyper-V machines created for virtual disaster recovery purposes contain one or several virtual disks (their number equals the number of hard disks you have backed up). These virtual disks have the VHD or VHDX format. The format is determined by the version of Hyper-V and the system updates installed on your computer. Generally, VHDX disks are created on Hyper-V generation 3.0. VHD disks are created on Hyper-V 2.0.

If you do not have Hyper-V installed on the host machine, consider the "Local VHD file" target instead. It creates a VHD file that can be added to a virtual machine later.

Additional Required Software

The host system must have the following software installed:

  1. Virtual disaster recovery software (the Backup Manager or the Recovery Console).
  2. Hyper-V 2.0 or 3.0. (Hyper-V Specific - not required for Local VHD file recovery)

VMWare VMDK & VMWare ESXi

Cove's virtual disaster recovery feature lets you create a VMware machine in a local directory for VMDK and recover your system there.

You will find the following files in the target directory after recovery:

  1. VMX - the primary configuration file, that can be opened with VMware Player/Workstation.
  2. VMDK - a virtual disk file, that stores the contents of the virtual machine's hard disk drive. The number of VMDK disks equals the number of hard drives in the source system.

If you want to enable continuous recovery for multiple devices, consider using the target vSphere/ESXi server as your virtual disaster recovery host. Make sure you use the same datacenter and storage for the host machine and the target machine. This will give you twofold or threefold speed increase (confirmed by in-house tests).

Once these requirements are met, carefully follow the Virtual Disaster Recovery Instructions to enable VDR for the appropriate target.