Using CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby › Recovering Source Servers Using Bare Metal Recovery

Recovering Source Servers Using Bare Metal Recovery

After you correct the problems or perform maintenance on your source servers, Virtual Standby lets you recover the source servers to their last healthy state, and include the incremental changes that occurred while the Recovery Point Snapshot was powered on.

This recovery process is called a V2P (virtual to physical) recovery.

The V2P recovery process leverages the CA ARCserve D2D Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) process to restore data from virtual machines to physical machines. BMR is the process of restoring a computer system from bare metal, including reinstalling the operating system and software applications, and then restoring the data and settings.

Before you can perform BMR, you must have:

• One of the following things:
  • A customized Windows PE image (D2DBMR.ISO) which is released with the CA ARCserve D2D product.
  • A BMR USB stick which is created from the boot kit wizard, with the Windows 7/Windows Vista/Windows 2008/Windows 2008R2 installation media (CD/DVD). (You can also use the USB stick with the Windows PE image instead of the installation media to load the necessary drivers during BMR, if necessary).

    Note: If you are using a USB stick you can add additional drivers to it, which you cannot do with the Windows PE image.

• At least one full backup available.
• At least 1-GB RAM installed on the virtual machine and the source server that you are recovering.
• To recover VMware virtual machines to VMware virtual machines that are configured to behave as physical servers, verify the VMware Tools application is installed on the destination virtual machine.

Dynamic disks are restored at the disk level only. If your data is backed up to a local volume on a dynamic disk, you cannot to restore this dynamic disk during BMR. In this scenario, to restore during BMR you must perform one of the following tasks and then perform BMR from the copied Recovery Point:

• Back up to a volume on another drive.
• Back up to a remote share.
• Copy a recovery point to another location.

Note: If you perform BMR to a dynamic disk, do not perform any pre-BMR disk operations (such as cleaning or deleting volume) or else the presence of the disk may not be recognized.

Regardless of which method you used to create the Boot Kit image, the BMR process is basically the same.

The application lets you recover data using the methods described in the following table: