Prerequisites for Windows integrated bare metal recovery

Consider the prerequisites for integrated BMR as you plan your disaster recovery strategy. For Windows operating systems not supported by integrated BMR, use Windows image-based bare metal recovery .

Supported operating systems

Recovery to identical hardware and virtual machines is supported for the operating systems listed below.

     Windows XP (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows Server 2003 R2 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows 8 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows 8.1 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows Server 2008 (32- and 64-bit)

     Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)

     Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)

     Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)

Recovery to dissimilar hardware is supported for clients running Windows Vista/Server 2008 and later.

Additional considerations for integrated BMR

     GPT disks are supported.

     Dynamic disks are not supported.

Note: To protect the operating systems of clients using dynamic disks, you must use cold bare metal protection, as described in Performing cold bare metal backups and restores.

     BIOS- and UEFI-based clients are supported. The firmware interface type (BIOS or UEFI) of the destination machine must match that of the failed client.

     Backups used for the recovery must contain disk metadata (For details, see About eligible backups for Windows integrated bare metal recovery)

     Backups used for the recovery must have been run with agent version 7.4 or higher.

     Recovery to a virtual machine is supported on VMware ESX/ESXi 5.0 and higher and all versions of Hyper-V.

     Wireless network adapters cannot be used for the recovery.

     The integrated bare metal recovery ISO image contains WinPE 4.0, which is based on Windows 8. If you are restoring to a physical machine, you might need to add Windows 8 drivers for the restore. For more about adding drivers during the recovery process, see About adding drivers during the integrated bare metal recovery.

     WinPE 4.0 requires the processor features NX, PAE, SSE2 to be enabled. You might need to enable these features for a physical destination machine before booting from the ISO image. For instructions, see KB 1632. Machines that do not have these processor features cannot be used for the restore.

     After recovering a Hyper-V server, you must run the following command on the Hyper-V server: bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype Auto. You should then reboot the server.