Backup storage

Use the Configure > Appliances > Storage tab to manage your appliance's backup storage. Supported storage procedures vary by Unitrends appliance type:

●   Recovery Series, Recovery MAX, and ION/ION+ physical appliances come with a set amount of backup storage. You cannot add backup storage to the appliance.

●   Unitrends Backup virtual appliances deploy as virtual machines. During deployment, the initial backup storage was created using either a virtual attached disk, a SAN LUN, or a NAS share. After initial deployment, you can add more backup storage. See About adding backup storage to a Unitrends Backup appliance for details.

Appliance storage can be used to store backups, for instant recovery of VMs and Windows image-level backups, and for Windows replicas. To use the instant recovery and Windows replica features, you must allocate a portion of the appliance storage to Instant Recovery in the Edit Storage dialog (as described in To edit storage allocation). For more on these features, see Virtual machine instant recovery, Instant recovery of Windows image-level backups, and Windows file-level replicas.

Once storage is allocated to instant recovery, it can be used only for Windows replicas and instant recovery. The storage is reserved and cannot be used for other purposes, such as backups or deduplication (but you can modify your storage allocation at any time).

Because the appliance is designed to retain as many local backups as possible, it is best to reserve instant recovery space soon after initial deployment. If necessary, you can allocate instant recovery space later, but doing so may require the appliance to purge local backups to make room for the newly allocated instant recovery space.

Before allocating storage, determine the percentage to use for backups and the percentage to reserve for Windows replicas and instant recovery. Instant recovery storage requirements are given here:

●   VM instant recovery and Windows image-level instant recovery – The disks for the recovered asset will reside on the appliance until storage migration completes. Allocate at least 20% of the space used on the original Windows asset or virtual machine to instant recovery storage. Additionally, ensure that there is enough extra storage to account for anticipated growth during the recovery process, especially for long-running recoveries. Once disks have been migrated to another location, or BMR is complete and the IR is torn down, the appliance’s instant recovery storage is no longer needed.

●   Windows replicas – Requirements vary by recovery target:

●   Virtual host target – If recovering to an ESXi or Hyper-V server, no appliance instant recovery storage is needed.

●   Recovery Series, Recovery MAX, or ION/ION+ appliance target – If recovering to the Unitrends appliance, the disks for the recovered asset reside on the appliance. Ensure that instant recovery storage space equal to the amount of space used on the Windows asset’s original disks is available on the appliance.

For Recovery Series, Recovery MAX, ION/ION+, and Unitrends Backup appliances, you can view backup storage and modify the amount of storage allocated for backups and instant recovery. See these procedures for details:

1.  On the Configure > Appliances page, select the appliance.

2.  Select the Storage tab below.

This information displays for each storage device: name, status, type, capacity, total size, and free space.

1.  On the Configure > Appliances page, select the appliance.

2.  On the Storage tab, select the Internal storage and click Edit.

3.  Modify the percentages used for backups versus instant recovery, and click Save.