Dell Replay Manager Version 7.8 Administrator’s Guide

Support of Recovery with Pass-Through Disks

As Microsoft supports the virtualization of applications like SQL Server and Exchange, more administrators are virtualizing their application environments and using pass-through disks for data volumes. If there are pass-through disks attached to a virtual machine, Replay Manager can be installed on the virtual server guest to back up the data volumes for the application. Because of the abstraction layer that is introduced in virtualizing the hardware, the only way to recover a snapshot directly back to the virtual machine is by using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator which is available as a free download from Microsoft (for Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Server 2008 (and later), the iSCSI Software Initiator is included with the operating system). iSCSI uses Ethernet connectivity which is readily accessible by a virtual machine and is easy to configure both on the server as well as the storage.