Hyper-V Backup and Unitrends Bridge


Release 8 (our next release) for our Recovery-Series purpose built backup appliances and our Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ (UEB) virtual appliances, will be entering beta soon and be released in the fourth quarter.  A more comprehensive post (or series of posts!) will be made in the next few weeks concerning the overall feature/functionality, but because Windows Server and Hyper-V Server have been gaining such mind share and traction among our customers and our new buyers I thought I’d do a quick post to let everyone know a few features that are coming soon.  Note these are just a few selected feature highlights with respect to Release 8.

Unitrends is extending hypervisor support in Unitrends Bridge™ for Hyper-V.  As a reminder, Unitrends Bridge is a 1-click P2V (Physical to Virtual) capability that enables protected Windows systems to be transformed into virtual machines.  The benefits are

  • Windows Instant Recovery is available not only on our physical appliances but on our UEB virtual appliance.  In this mode the VM operates in essence as a standby server – constantly being updated by each subsequent backup.
  • You may optionally relinquish control so that this VM no longer operates as a standby server.  At that point you’re able to run, mount, shrink, grow, convert to other types, and perform other operations on the VM.  You may also then protect it again.

This is available for both our Recovery-Series physical appliances and our UEB virtual appliance – at no cost to our customers. This is the capability that has enabled Unitrends to offer our WIR (Windows Instant Recovery) feature on our physical appliances and  also offers a 1-click P2V capability for external virtualization hosts for both our physical and virtual appliances.

Unitrends Bridge supports the transformation of physical Windows systems or Windows systems that are implemented as a GOS (Guest Operating System) in any virtualization infrastructure into a virtual machine. VMware vSphere was previously supported by the transformation engine; now we’re supporting Microsoft Hyper-V.

Unitrends Bridge on a Recovery-Series physical appliance enables the creation of a standby virtual machine that can reside on the physical appliance itself or on a specified virtualization host.  The virtualization type supported on the physical appliance itself is KVM and the virtualization type supported on the specified virtualization host is VMware vSphere and in the next release Microsoft Hyper-V.

Unitrends Bridge on our UEB virtual appliance enables the creation of a standby virtual machine on a specified virtualization host.  The virtualization host must be VMware vSphere in release 7.5 and prior; with our new release it can be Microsoft Hyper-V as well.

We’re pretty excited about this – let us know what you think here, in Spiceworks, or anywhere else!

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