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MIS Tech (Singapore)

March, 2007

by William Kwok

Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server with Acronis Universal Restore

William Kwok tests the latest version of this popular backup application

What it is:

Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server is a system backup and recovery tool for both Windows or Linux servers and workstations with support for applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle.

What it's good for:

Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server is specially designed for businesses where the Recovery Time Objective is in minutes, not hours. It is suitable for both Microsoft Windows and Linux environments with 24 x 7 requirements. The support for 64-bit operating systems fulfills the potential of newer dual-core 64-bit processors. Support for wide range of storage technologies including DAS, NAS, SAN, tapes, USB and IEEE-1394 compliant storage devices., CD and DVD, removable drives makes deployment very flexible to suit an organization's particular needs or requirements. Acronis Universal Restore option provides for added flexibility in performing recovering to different hardware platforms.

Less suited to:

The Acronis Universal Restore option for Acronis True Image Enterprise Server is currently only supported for Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows XP Professional so this additional feature is not available for Linux servers and workstations.

Features:

The Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server consists of several components: The Management Console, Agents for Windows and Linux, Acronis Backup Server, Group Server and Enterprise Server (local version). The Acronis Universal Restore is an add-on option.

Let's go through various scenarios of how to use the Acronis True Image Enterprise Server to perform recovery ranging from a departmental server to enterprise servers.

Most administrators will appreciate how useful it will be to be able to perform a quick recovery to resolve problems ranging from corruption or misconfiguration of your operating systems to accidental deletion of files. If you have made the preparations then you will have nothing to worry about. Firstly, you install Acronis True Image Enterprise Server (local version), next activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and create image backup of your system and data partitions in the recommended Acronis Secure Zone^®. You may also want to create a bootable media (boot CD) containing Acronis applications.

Let's look at what you need to do to perform recovery. At boot time, you can press F11 to launch Acronis Startup Recovery which allows you to run the Acronis True Image Enterprise Server without first having to boot up to Windows and does not require any recovery CD to boot up. From here, you can perform recovery tasks using the Restore Data Wizard which lets you select the backup archive location, which in this case is in Acronis Secure Zone^®, which is a partition that is not accessible to applications except Acronis.

You can also make use of the Acronis Snap Restore feature which allows you to start using your computer without waiting for the completion of the entire restoration process. You can restore your system and/or data partitions with the option to change the size of the restored partition. You can even validate the backup archive before restoration. Note that you can perform the recovery without the need for additional CDs or backup devices. Restoration is completed within minutes.

What if the server hard-disk crashes? No worries, you can make use of the boot CD to load selected Acronis applications entirely into RAM, which will subsequently free up the drive for you to put a recovery data CD or DVD to perform recovery onto the replacement hard-disk.

Management:

Let's shift the scenario to servers in your enterprise network. If you have Acronis Bootable Agent installed, you will be able to manage the functions and perform the tasks of Acronis True Image Enterprise Server remotely from a management PC running Windows XP using Acronis True Image Management Console. From the Acronis Management—Console, you can remotely install components such as Acronis Backup Server, Acronis True Image Agent and Acronis True Image Enterprise Server as well as create bootable rescue media.

Another useful feature is the optional Acronis Universal Restore. As the name implies, Acronis Universal Restore, allows you to restore the backup image of a particular hardware onto a different hardware which makes the restore, hardware independent or universal. For my test, I used 2 servers, HP DL380 G3 and DL380 G4. If a hot-pluggable hard disk containing the Windows Server 2003 operating system previously installed on the G4 was used for booting up the G3, it produces a blue screen at the Windows boot-up. Now to perform a recovery on the G3, I make use of the rescue CD to run Acronis True Image Enterprise Server with Acronis Universal Restore, and choose an existing backup of a G4. The application was able to detect a missing driver and prompt me to provide the location or driver CD before continuing with the restoration. The resulting recovery was successful. Applying this concept further to recovery from disasters, the ability to recover to different hardware platforms greatly simplifies the recovery process and lower business risks.

There is also support for a Acronis True Image Linux agent for Linux. You can also manage groups of computers together using the Acronis Group Server.

Alerts:

Backups can be scheduled as well as customized with pre-post commands, before and after data capture commands, compression level, backup priority, notification (for success, failure and user interaction required) via email or windows messenger and event tracing via windows application event log (for information, warning and error messages) and SNMP notifications. You can create image backups, which is recommended for fastest recovery, or files and folders backups.