Recovery Assurance

Recovery assurance addresses the following scenarios for your virtual and physical workloads:

1 Certifying that your backups fulfill the requirements specified in your business continuity plan by testing for RPO/RTO compliance, malware infection, and application behavior in a failover scenario.
2 Orchestrating failover from certified recovery points in the event of a disaster.
3 Accessing production data as fully functional VMs contained within isolated testing labs. These instant labs enable you to scan for malware, perform update testing, run compute intensive reports, and perform business analytics operations without impacting your production environment.

Recovery assurance functionality is provided through the data copy access job type. Data copy access (DCA) jobs run in three modes that directly correspond to the three scenarios described above.

1 Run Test - This is the default mode for data copy access jobs and can be configured to run on a schedule. VMs stood up by this mode are automatically torn down after testing is complete.
2 Failover - This mode is used to orchestrate failover to your recovery network. This mode cannot be configured to run on a schedule.
3 Instant Lab - This mode is used to stand up VMs that remain on your test network until they are manually torn down. This mode cannot be configured to run on a schedule.

Recovery assurance VMs can be run on your virtual host server (ESXi or Hyper-V) or directly on your physical Recovery Series or Recovery MAX appliance:

• On-virtual host DCA – Running recovery assurance VMs on your ESXi or Hyper-V server provides full network capability. You can utilize all job modes (Run Test, Failover, and Instant Lab) and run custom tests for your applications.
• On-box DCA – Running recovery assurance VMs on your physical Unitrends appliance provides no network capability. You can use the Run Test job mode only to stand up and power on VMs. No other job modes or custom tests are supported.

Note:  Network capability for on-box VMs will be added in an upcoming release

See the following table for a comparison of on-virtual host and on-box capabilities:

 

On-virtual host recovery assurance

On-box recovery assurance

Supported backup methods
• Agentless host-level backups of Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines
• Windows image-level backups (run with the Windows agent)
• Windows file-level backups (run with the Windows agent)
• Windows image-level backups (run with the Windows agent)

Supported operating systems
• Any OS running as a VM in a supported version of VMWare with VMWare Tools installed.
• Any OS running as a VM in a Windows 2012 or above Hyper-V instance.
• Any Windows OS that can be protected by Windows image-level or Windows file-level backups.

Notes:   

• See the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix for supported versions of Windows.
• For complete requirements, see Requirements for Windows image-level protection or Requirements and considerations for file-level backups.

Any Windows OS that can be protected by Windows image-level backups.

Notes:   

• See the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix for supported versions of Windows.
• For complete requirements, see Requirements for Windows image-level protection.

Verification method

The appliance logs into the VM via the hypervisor tools to verify connectivity to the OS and optionally verify application layer services and items within the booted VM.

Note:  There is no screenshot verification.

Screenshot verification:

• The desired machine is booted and a screenshot is taken of the login screen after booting.
• The screenshot is included in each test report.

Note:  There is no application testing.

Reporting

Recovery Assurance and Compliance reports are available from the desktop and the Reports menu.

Additionally, certification status is reported in UniView.

Screenshot verification is sent as part of the DCA Job Notifications report and the Compliance report.

Recovery Assurance and Compliance reports are available from the desktop and the Reports menu.

Additionally, certification status is reported in UniView.

Testing types

Boot and application level

Boot

Orchestration

Groups of VMs can be tested simultaneously with boot order and boot groups that can be applied.

One VM at a time is booted and tested. The VM is then powered off before booting the next VM. Boot order can also be specified.

Resources used

Resources are shared between the appliance and the hypervisor:

• The virtual machine is created in the hypervisor. RAM and CPU is provided by the target hypervisor.
• For test/audit functionality, the virtual disk(s) stay on the appliance with only changed data being written to the Internal storage of the appliance’s Instant Recovery space.
• For Failover functionality, the disk is initially created on the appliance using the appliance’s Instant Recovery space. Then, the disk is live-migrated from the appliance to the hypervisor’s storage using tools from the hypervisor.

See Virtual machine instant recovery for specifics pertaining to the hypervisor for live storage migration.

All testing resources are provided by the appliance:

• Deltas (changes) are written to the Internal storage Instant Recovery space allocated on the appliance.
• Appliance CPU and RAM are both used to boot the VM.

For further information on recovery assurance, see the following topics:

• Recovery assurance requirements and considerations
• Recovery assurance procedures
• Custom tests