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Create virtual instances with IDrive BMR

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Virtualization with IDrive BMR

Virtualization in IDrive BMR allows you to quickly create a virtual instance of your computers and VMware servers, either locally on your IDrive BMR device or on the cloud. This ensures that you can achieve business continuity with minimal downtime, in the event of a disaster.

Create instant virtual instances

IDrive BMR uses the KVM hypervisor for better virtualization and high performance. With IDrive BMR, you can virtualize a machine instantly and have uninterrupted business operations.

You can create upto 4 virtual instances of the computers and VMware servers on the IDrive BMR device and on the cloud. The limit to assign memory depends on the RAM configuration of your device and the memory available for cloud virtualization.

Create virtual instance of a Mac OS X based VM

Mac OS X runs on specialized UEFI firmware, thus, it may not be virtualized on the IDrive BMR device in all cases. However, you can restore the Mac OS X based VM to the ESXi server without any issue. Additionally, you will be able to perform a file-level restore from the VM, via IDrive BMR VMware's file restore feature.

Retain  static IP configurations on a virtualized machine

Your machine's static IP address is set on your ethernet network adapter. When you create a virtual instance of a machine, the NIC hardware will be different from the original and will reset the IP to DHCP. If your work environment is static-IP dependent, you will need to manually configure the network settings after restore.

Network source options available for creating virtual instances to avoid conflict with the production machine

Configure the connection of the new virtual instance to other devices and locations on the network by selecting a suitable network source.

 The network source options available for creating a virtual instance are:

Disconnected

Isolate a virtual instance from all networks using the ‘Disconnected’ option. The virtual machine will not have any LAN or internet access.

NAT (Firewalled)

Create an isolated virtual network with internet access using the ‘NAT (Firewalled)’ option — Network Address Translation mode. This will permit the virtual instance to have outbound internet access without causing any conflict with the production instance of the machine.

Bridged

Connect the virtual instance to the local network that hosts the IDrive BMR device using the ‘Bridged’ option. The virtual instance will appear within the same subnet as the IDrive BMR device and will be able to detect and communicate with the devices on the network.

Note: Bridged network source is not available for cloud virtualization.

IDrive BMR backups are not dependent on the backup chain and does not affect virtualization

IDrive BMR does not follow the traditional data backup method in which every recovery point created during incremental image backup has some dependency on previous ones. The created recovery points will be fully independent of each other and data can be reconstructed using any recovery point, even if the previous full/incremental image backup in the chain is lost. Thus, you can create a virtual machine with any available recovery point without depending on the integrity of the backup chain.