Hello and welcome to the Dell Power Protect Data Manager video demonstrating a business continuity solution called Quick Recovery that helps users get their production environment, running critical business applications, back online quickly from a remote PPDM. In case of disaster, PPDM supports multiple business continuity solutions to continue business and get the backup infrastructure back online with minimal RTO. Important among these solutions is Quick Recovery after a disaster.
The Quick Recovery feature enables users to restore assets and data that they replicated to a destination PPDM system at a remote site and continue the business from the remote site until the source PPDM comes back online. When there is a loss of protected assets at the source side, you can use the Quick Recovery feature to restore the assets from destination storage. PPDM started supporting Quick Recovery from version 19.9, supporting only a few workload types such as file system and VMware. In later versions, more workload types were added such as Kubernetes with PPDM release 19.16. The Quick Recovery feature now supports the following additional workloads: MSS Exchange, SQL, AppDirect, SAP HANA, Oracle, file system, and VM file-level recovery (FLR).
In this video, we are demonstrating the Quick Recovery feature with SQL AppDirect Agents. Log into the Power Protect Data Manager appliance by providing your admin credentials, and you will land on the PPDMS dashboard. Before you enable Quick Recovery in PPDM, you must complete some tasks: make sure that the source and destination PPDMS are network accessible to each other and that each is pingable via fully qualified domain name or IP address. A different SQL AppDirect Agent, other than the source SQL AppDirect agent, is discovered on the destination PPDM server. The assets in the source PPDM must be protected as part of a policy that has replication enabled.
Let's go to the policies and see whether we have replication enabled for the desired policies on the protection policies page. We can see that the SQL databases are protected, go to Edit Policy, and see whether the replication stage is already enabled for the policy. Here, we can see that replication is enabled for the desired policy. Proceed with the other pages, verify the details of the policy, and click Save.
In addition to the primary protection and replication stages in the protection policies, we need to sync the metadata between the local PPDM and the remote PPDM. Navigate to System Settings and then Disaster Recovery. When the Disaster Recovery wizard opens, select Remote Systems and click Add to add the details of the remote PPDM server. Enter a descriptive system name and the fully qualified domain name or IP of the remote PPDM. Leave the port value to the default and the sync option enabled. We add credentials named PPPDM2, then verify the certificate and save the details. You can see here that the configuration of synchronization with the remote PPDM is successful.
Because we already have successful protection and replication jobs, go to Restore and make sure that the assets that are enabled for replication have replication copies. Also, on the Copy Management page, you can see the filtered replication copies in the list. We also need to make sure that metadata is synced to the replication target so that the user can restore these protected assets from the destination DM5500. Here you can see that the sync metadata operation has completed successfully, and the Details tab provides all the details.
Now let's go to the destination PPDM in case of disaster. The destination PPDM is ready with all the necessary data and metadata to restore the source PPDM assets. The user can also discover a new SQL AppDirect Agent in the destination PPDM. In the right top corner of the destination appliance, click the Remote System icon and select the source DM5500, which is shown as the remote system in the destination. We can now see the source PPDM in the destination; restore alerts and jobs are the only options available in the remote view.
On the Restore page, click the SQL tab, choose one of the assets, and verify the details of the remote copies by selecting Restore. The backup copies are available to be restored from the destination PPDM. Select the copy and proceed to the next page. Select the scope and click Next. Here, we need to restore the copies to an alternate host because we will not be able to register the same SQL agent to multiple PPDM servers. Select the ""Restore to Alternate"" option, and we see the details of the alternate SQL AppDirect Agent. Expand the details of the SQL AppDirect agent and select the ""Restore as New Database"" option. Provide a name for the database, save the details, and click Next.
To restore the backup copies, we enter the OS credentials, including name, username, and password. Click Save and then click Next. Here we select a user-specified file location, then click Next. Leave all other options as default and go to the Summary page. Click Restore. Great! The restore process is initiated. Let's monitor the restore job's progress. Awesome! The restore is now complete. Go to the restore location and cross-verify the restored data. You can see that the data and log files are successfully restored to the new location.
This is how Quick Recovery provides users with immediate access to their protected copies on a remote appliance whenever the source appliance cannot be reached. Thanks for watching.
