Altaro released the new Altaro Physical Server Backup solution to allow administrators to not only protect their virtual machines but also their physical machines which have not yet been converted.
With this new product Altaro is now able to provide a complete solution to protect both virtual (check out Altaro VM Backup) and physical environments.
This new product is able to backup physical servers and recover them to a VM or as virtual disk VHDX. It is actually a Physical to Virtual (P2V) solution that performs a physical machine to a virtual machine (running on Hyper-V) convertion. Change block tracking (CBT) as well as application-aware processing are fully supported.
VMware vSphere is not currently supported in this first release.
Altaro Physical Server Backup prerequisites
Hardware requirements
- Minimum of i5 (or equivalent) processor
- 2 GB RAM
- 1 GB Hard Disk Space + 15 GB (for temporary files created during backup operations)
- Minimum of 10% free disk space on each volume holding live VM data to be used for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy
- Partitions being backed up must be NTFS or FAT32
Supported OSs
- Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019
Software prerequisites
- MS .NET Framework 4.0/4.5 and 4.7 (required for TLS 1.2) on Windows Server 2012
Supported backup targets
- External USB and eSata drives
- USB flash drives
- Fileserver network shares
- NAS devices
- PC Internal hard drives
Install Altaro Physical Server Backup
Download the software from Altaro website in the physical server to backup then run the installation file. Accept the EULA and click Install.
The product is being installed.
After few seconds the software has been installed. Click Reboot to restart the server.
The Altaro Physical Server Backup's dashboard.
Create a Backup Job
After installing Altaro Physical Server Backup in the physical server to protect, launch the console from Chrome browser and enter the correct credentials then click Sign in.
From Setup > License you can enter the license received from Altaro or use the trial version for 30 days. Click Set a License Key to enter the license key.
Copy and paste the received license and click Assign License Key.
The license has been entered successfully.
Access the Setup > Backup Settings area to configure the backup parameters. Click Set a backup location to specify the backup repository.
Select Network path to use a CIFS repository type. Enter the network path and the credentials to access the share then click Test Connection to check the correct connectivity. Click Select to save the specified repository.
Once the target location to store backups has been specified, optionally you can enable the backup Encryption (AES-256). Specify the Retention and the Schedule then click Save.
In the Protected Volumes section you can specify the volumes to include in the Backup Job. By default all volumes are included.
To receive notifications about backup operations, under Email Notifications you can configure the email parameters.
Go to Backup and click Take Backup to perform a backup immediately without waiting for the scheduled time.
The backup is being executed.
Depending on the sever size, after some minutes the backup completes successfully.
If more backups are taken, in the Backups area you can find the available RPOs based on the specified retention.
In the Dashboard is reported the status of latest backup.
With Altaro Physical Server Backup organizations are now able to backup physical servers without the hassle of using third party solutions that sometimes present issues due to compatibility.
Future plans for the Altaro Physical Server Backup Solution, is the integration of this new backup tool into the Cloud Management Console, where one would be able to manage backups of virtual machines, physical machines and Office 365 Organisations, from the same web console with easy of mind and under Subscription Licensing. This would also entitle users to official tech support and advantageous pricing.
Altaro Physical Server Backup can be downloaded as freeware with a community support forum available for assistance.
