What is persistent boot’s role in Vembu BDR?
As per the current design, during instant boot the modifications made in the booted Virtual machine will not be stored as an incremental. Whenever a VM is shut down, the modifications made in it will be deleted. In a real time scenario, a customer may require to start the virtual machine from the last instant boot state, so we made changes in db and temp files to keep the changes even after the backup is unmounted and the VMs are stopped. Even restarting VembuBDR will keep the changes stored in storage location.
Where is it used?
If a customer or user lost the client connection for any reason he/she would report to administrator team and they will try accessing backup server and go through the recovery option instant boot and create the VMs. Then the client credentials are provided to customer and customer resume his work. Hence the administrator team is required to create the RAW machine and perform the disk restore using latest time stamp, which has the latest changes in the restored new machine. Once done, the restore progress administrator team would give the new machine to the customer and he can continue his work without losing any data with the new machine.
There are two ways that these stored changes in VM support persistent boot:
- Instant boot via creating VMs along with the changes (It will be like resuming a real time system to resume your unfinished tasks).
- The changes made to a VHD file attached to the disk management will also remain constant and gets written to the files which can be retrieved for future references.
The files created in storage location are:
For Windows:
<file_name>. sgft – size 2GB
<File_name>. sgmd – size 2GB
<Chunk_files> File – Size 200 MB.
For Linux:
<Chunk_files> File – Size 200 MB.
Note: there are no sgtf and sgmd files required in Linux, as we use img file for instant booting.
Currently we support disk image and VMware plugins in both windows and Linux operating systems. This feature works only for already booted backup time stamp.
Recovery using persistent instant boot from VembuBDR UI:
Persistent boot with all changes to disk restore from VembuBDR UI:
