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 Passphrase before you begin.

Source system requirements

Supported Windows versions

The following Windows versions are supported for Virtual Disaster Recovery:

Backup selection requirements

Make sure the following data in the source system is backed up:

  1. The system state of your computer (the System State data source).
  2. The whole system disk – C:\ or another disk that has your operating system and that the operating system boots from (the Files and Folders data source).
  3. Any other data that is important to you. Supported data sources: Files and Folders, MS Exchange, and MS SQL.

It is possible to back up a system containing dynamic disks, though it should be noted that these are converted to basic disks during virtual disaster recovery.

If a disk uses the MBR partition table, the total size of its volumes must not exceed 2TB.

If in doubt concerning the selection of files, please perform a test restore or contact customer support for assistance.

Optional settings (for better restore speed)

If the data transfer speed through the Internet is not high enough, you can benefit from enabling the LocalSpeedVault in the source system.

Planning to perform recovery from another machine? Then consider placing the LocalSpeedVault folder on any of the following:

  • A removable storage drive that you will be able to attach to the host machine.
  • The host machine (if it is located on the local network).
  • Another machine on the local network that is accessible from the host machine.

Host system requirements

Supported Windows versions

The following Windows versions are supported for Virtual Disaster Recovery:

The host system must not be older than the source system. For example, if you want to restore Windows 10, you must install your recovery software on Windows 10 or a newer version.

If the source system contains ReFS partitions, the host system must use the same version of ReFS for restores to be successful.

Device passphrase

To find the device name, passphrase etc. for automatically installed devices, please see Get Passphrase for Managed Device.

If you do not know the Encryption Key/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).

The host machine must have 64-bit virtual disaster recovery software installed (the Backup Manager or the Recovery Console).

  1. VMware vSphere/VMware. All paid 64-bit versions are supported: 7.0 and 8.0

    Older versions of VMware may continue to work. However, as these have reached End of Life and are no longer supported by Microsoft, we can only offer limited support.

  2. 64-bit virtual disaster recovery software (the Backup Manager or the Recovery Console)
Free versions of VMware ESXi hosts are not supported. However, we have two workaround options available for these versions:
  1. Create a new virtual machine with required characteristics and perform bare metal recovery there (recommended as a faster option)
  2. Perform virtual disaster recovery to a VMDK file. Use VMware vCenter Converter to convert the local VMDK file from the workstation format to the appropriate format and to attach it to the ESXi server

For restore purposes, you must ensure the version of VMWare ESXi on the host device is the same or higher as is on the source device.

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