REPLAY: Bare Metal Restore to Dissimilar Hardware Guide

Table of Contents


New RRA test/usage guide

In order to simplify the driver installation process the new RRA is designed as a wizard.
There are 5 steps (5 wizard screens):

  • "Replay Recovery Anywhere"
  • "Hardware Identification"
  • "Installed Operating Systems"
  • "OS Identification"
  • "Confirm conversion"

 

Step one – "Replay Recovery Anywhere"

This step describes the overall RRA functionality

Step two – "Hardware Identification"

This step identifies the storage hardware currently configured on the machine where the wizard is being run. This step also shows the disk partition information.

Step three – "Installed Operating Systems"

This step inventories Operating System installations on all local hard drives. It allows user to choose which OS found on the local disk(s) will be used for driver injection.
Drivers for the hardware identified in the wizard’s 2nd step (Hardware Identification) will be installed (injected) into the offline installation of the OS selected in this step.

Step four – "OS Identification"

This step identifies the system directory of the OS selected in step 3 and the storage controller currently configured for this offline OS installation. This step DOES NOT show the storage controller driver identiefied in step 2,with which the configured one will be replaced.

Step five – "Confirm conversion"

This last step shows the summary of the operation about to be performed. User is presented with the path to the system directory of the OS installation on one of the local disks. This is the offline OS installation whose storage controller driver is about to be modified.
Second piece of information is the storage controller currently configured for the offline OS.
The third piece of information is the storage controller which will be installed instead of the currently configured one.

This step also allows for changing the driver which RRA automatically selected for you to something else.
To change the driver click on the "Change Driver" button and select one of the items from the dialog that comes up

Install a driver from the supplied drivers list

RRA pre-packages some of the most common drivers in a separate download, available on the website. Once you point RRA to the location of the driver storage, it will list the drivers available in that storage.

Press “Change” to override the RRA’s automatic selection with the driver of your choice.

Installing a driver using the inf files

In RRA you have the ability to install drivers that are not on the supplied drivers list. This is done by downloading the driver, unpacking it to a directory and making this directory available to RRA. RRA will look in the selected directory for the driver’s .inf file(driver description file) If the .inf file is valid and can be parsed, the controller drivers described in the .inf file will be shown to the user. User than can select the desired driver.

Log files

Log  files

For diagnostic purposes, the wizard creates log files that can aid developers in troubleshooting the issues
There are 2 log files that should be attached to all the issues created for RRA “rra_log.txt” that contains the output of the managed code and “RegWinPeInstallEditorLibrary.log” that contains the output of the unmanaged code.
The files will be created at the root directory of the drive the RRA wizard is run from.

Back to the List of Tech Docs
Dell AppAssure Software for Exchange continuously protects and monitors the health of your Exchange data stores and allows administrators to quickly search, recover, and analyze mailbox content. With Dell AppAssure Software for Exchange you can backup and restore individual email messages, folders, or mailboxes to a live Exchange server or directly to a PST, thereby solving some of your most costly and time consuming challenges.
Dell AppAssure Software for SQL is an enterprise SQL server backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including system and user databases, SQL binaries and the server - making it possible to restore both servers and databases in just minutes.
Dell AppAssure Software for Hyper-V is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. Dell AppAssure Software for Hyper-V supports both host and guest level backup methodologies while delivering accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Dell AppAssure Software for SharePoint is an enterprise backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including front-end servers, SQL servers and the web servers - making it possible to restore both the entire SharePoint environment, individual SharePoint servers and databases and individual SharePoint objects in just minutes.
Dell AppAssure Software for Windows Servers is an application-aware, server-based backup and disaster recovery software solution that delivers fast application backups, fast local recoveries and off-site disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Dell Small businesses typically have limited IT resources and smaller staffs than large enterprises, but with Dell AppAssure Software for Windows Small Business Server they have full access to the same powerful server backup and recovery software tools found in larger organizations.
Dell AppAssure Software for VMware is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows workloads running VMware virtual environments. With one price for an unlimited number of guests, Dell AppAssure Software delivers accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Dell AppAssure Software for Windows Desktops (VDI) simplifies and automates backup and disaster recovery processes, while giving an administrator the ability to remotely monitor and manage large VDI deployments or geographically distributed machines from a single console.
DocRetriever for SharePoint dramatically simplifies the process of restoring individual documents, sites, sub-sites and folders. SharePoint Administrators no longer need to spend countless hours rebuilding your entire production database, or worry about deploying a temporary SharePoint recovery farm, just to recover an individual document or list item.
MailRetriever for Exchange is an affordable and easy-to-use e-mail recovery software package for browsing, recovering, searching, exporting, and analyzing e-mail and mailbox content directly from any unmounted Microsoft Exchange Data Store (EDB). MailRetriever for Exchange can even open and repair corrupted EDB files. With MailRetriever for Exchange, you are never more than just a few clicks away from recovering a message or mailbox. MailRetriever for Exchange eliminates the need for time-consuming full-server and EDB restores for message recovery.
For individual message or mailbox recovery, Dell AppAssure Software and Microsoft Storage Solutions have partnered together to deliver MailRetriever for DPM, enabling Microsoft Exchange administrators around the world to gain efficient and economical access to message-level recovery.
Dell AppAssure´s Backup software for Kaseya lets you recover from any server failure to physical or virtual machines in minutes, backup and recover either locally or offsite, and provide offsite DR to customers with low bandwidth through integrated deduplication and replication.
Dell AppAssure Backup & Disaster Recovery Software is best way to back up and protect your VMware virtual machines. It doesn´t just support your virtual environment - rather; it leverages VMware ESX, ESXi and vSphere to provide a whole new level of protection for all your virtualized applications, services and desktops. Dell AppAssure Software lets you meet your VMware backup RTO and RPO objectives for less.