Dell EMC Avamar for Windows Servers 19.7 User Guide

BMR requirements

Avamar supports BMR to physical and virtual machines:

• Physical machine to physical machine
• Virtual machine to virtual machine
• Physical to virtual machine (P2V)

The following table lists the Windows versions and virtual machine environments that are supported for P2V BMR.

Avamar performs P2V BMR operations on a best-effort basis, and cannot guarantee that all possible combinations of physical hardware can be successfully converted to a virtual machine.

Verify that the environment meets the following requirements before you perform a BMR:

• A valid BMR backup exists. Find the Windows VSS plug-in backup on the Avamar server. If the BootableSystemState column in the Backups table displays an entry for the ASR writer, then the backup is valid for BMR.
• The hardware on the target host is operational.

• The hardware configuration on the target host is similar to the hardware configuration on the host for which the Windows BMR backup was done (source host). Any hardware, driver, or firmware differences between the source and target host computers might cause the recovery to fail. For example, restore of a 64-bit host to 32-bit hardware is not supported.

  The Microsoft Support article “How to move a Windows installation to different hardware” on the Microsoft website states that Microsoft does not support restoring a System State backup from one computer to a target computer with a different make, model, or hardware configuration.

• The target host has at least 512 MB of RAM.

• The size of the disks on the target host is equal to or greater than the size of the disks on the source host.

  BMR fails to initialize and format the disk when the disk size on the target host is less than the disk size on the source host, even if the target system disk size is sufficient for the BMR backup data.

  After BMR, some unallocated space may remain. You can extend the partition after the recovery to use this extra space.

• There are at least as many disks on the target host as there were on the source host. The disk LUN numbering on the target host must match the disk LUN numbering on the source host.
• If the target host is a Windows 7 computer, then the computer does not use Windows XP Mode components. The Avamar Client for Windows does not support backup and recovery of Windows XP Mode components in Windows 7.

• You have the following information available:

  • The IP address and network name of the target host, and the accounting system pathname of the client computer, for example, /clients/mycomputer.mycompany.com.
  • The network name or IP address of the Avamar server to use for the recovery.
  • Account credentials for an Avamar Administrator account on the Avamar server. The credentials enable successful backup of BMR log files.