Unitrends Bridge™

[This post is one in a series concerning release 7.4 for Replication-Series physical appliances and our UEB virtual appliance.  The overview for this series may be found here.]

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 now available not only on our physical appliances but on our UEB (Unitrends Enterprise Backup™) 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 simple yet sophisticated technology is first available in release 7.4 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 – it’s now been revolutionized to offer 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.  In release 7.4, the transformation target is limited to VMware vSphere; in a future release we’ll add Microsoft Hyper-V; and in future releases new virtualization types will be included as well.

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.

Unitrends Bridge on our UEB virtual appliance enables the creation of a standby virtual machine on a specified virtualization host.  In release 7.4, the virtualization host must be VMware vSphere.

The Details

What types of Windows systems does Unitrends Bridge support?  Just a few of the latest Window server editions?  No – this is Unitrends – we support a plethora of Windows versions.

  • Windows Servers supported by Unitrends Bridge are:
  • Windows 2003
  • Windows 2003 R2
  • Windows 2008
  • Windows 2008 R2
  • Windows 2012
  • Windows 2012 R2

Both NTFS and ReFS file systems are supported.

  • Windows Clients supported by Unitrends Bridge are:
  • Windows XP 64-bit
  • Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit)
  • Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit)
  • Windows 8 and 8.1 (32- and 64-bit)

For both Windows Servers and Clients physical systems with PC as well as UEFI BIOS’s are supported.

All of these Windows Servers and Clients can be transformed from physical servers or from GOS’s (Guest Operating Systems) in the following virtual environments:

  • VMware vSphere
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Citrix XenServer
  • Xen
  • Parallels
  • KVM
  • RHEV
  • Oracle VM
  • And all others…

We’re pretty excited about this – and as always would love to hear what you think about this or any other topic.

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