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Windows system requirements for image-based bare metal

This section describes requirements for Windows bare metal protection.

ClosedSupported operating systems

The following operating systems support hot bare metal backups and restores:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 (WinPE 1.5)

Note:  On Windows 2000, hot bare metal does not guarantee application consistency since no applications are compliant with Microsoft Volume Shadow-copy Services (VSS) application programming interfaces on this operating system. Due to limited VSS support in Windows 2000, combinations of non-VSS aware applications can result in consistency issues with the system state. This can cause bare metal images to be unstable. If this occurs, use cold bare metal backups to ensure image integrity as described in Performing cold bare metal backups and restores.

• Microsoft Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit, WinPE 1.5). Recovery to identical hardware is supported. Recovery to dissimilar hardware is not supported.
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit, WinPE 1.5). Recovery to identical hardware is supported. Recovery to dissimilar hardware is supported for some distributions. See the Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix for details.
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 (WinPE 1.5).
• Vista (32-bit and 64-bit, WinPE 2.0)
• Windows 7 (WinPE 2.0)
• Windows 8 (WinPE 2.0)
• Windows 8.1 (WinPE 2.0)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit, WinPE 2.0)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (WinPE 2.0)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit, WinPE 2.0)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (WinPE 2.0)
ClosedAdditional image-based bare metal requirements

In addition, the following conditions must be met for hot bare metal backups:

• Unitrends Windows agent is installed on the client.
• Client is registered to the Unitrends appliance.
• Disks configured as Basic (not Dynamic).
• MBR boot partition.

Note:  Systems with dynamic disks can be protected through cold bare metal backups. See Linux cold bare metal protection for details. Systems with UEFI BIOS are automatically partitioned with GPT and should be protected with integrated BMR. See Windows integrated bare metal recovery for details.

ClosedWindows image-based restore requirements

The following conditions must be met for image-based restores:

• Bare metal boot media has been created and is available for the client.
• A valid hot bare metal backup exists for the client.
• The restore target machine has a minimum of 256MB of RAM available.
• The target has a graphics card supporting a minimum 800X600 resolution.
• The target disk is at least as large as the source disk.