[Windows Vista Ultimate 32bitonly 80 MB Super Compressed
Amancio Mccrae
New in this release
As always, please refer to our website for Alike's current release notes for the most up to date information on recent changes with Alike. Additionally, for a bit more depth on the changes, you may review the KB article, What's new in Alike v3.0.1.
Alike v3.0 introduces support for Microsoft's Hyper-V v2.0 and v3.0. In Alike v3.0, you can perform Q-Hybrid backups, VM replication, and full and file level restore. Additionally, you may now replicate or restore VMs between hypervisors.
In order to get the most from your Alike installation, be sure to review the requirements and best practices outlined below.
Additionally, you may want to review the Alike Deployment Guide for further details and configuration options.
Alike can be deployed on any Windows based system, as either a virtual or physical machine. There are strengths and weaknesses to either approach, so be sure to select the deployment method that makes the most sense in your environment. Alike can utilize either locally attached storage or any CIFS enabled storage.
If deployed on a physical machine, separate from your virtual infrastructure, Alike will have the lightest touch on your production environment. Conversely, Alike can be easily deployed as a virtual machine in the environment it is intended to backup. This can be a very pragmatic approach, especially if the required resources for processing is not a concern. Typically in this deployment method, Alike will use remote storage or CIFS for its data store.
Please see the section on protecting Alike below for more information on recovering an Alike installation.
Getting the latest Alike build
Getting the latest version of Alike is easy to do. You may visit our website at any time. Additionally, once you have Alike installed, you can allow it to periodically check for updates and notify you automatically when they are available.
Please note: The installation of Alike on an Microsoft Small Business Server or a Domain Controller is not recommended.
Alike requires Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework or higher to function.
Hardware requirements
Alike 's hardware requirements are mainly dependant upon the version of Windows you are running. Please refer to your operating system for the minimum and recommended hardware requirements.
Networking
Alike requires a standard TCP/IP (IPV4) compliant network device to operate. Due to the large data volumes that Alike will most likely be processing, a Gigabit ethernet NIC is highly recommended.
Alike can transfer large amounts of backup data over your network, so understanding how it behaves is important. For example, ABD based backup jobs perform nearly all of their work directly over the IP/network that you assigned to your ABD, whereas Q-Hybrid backups will transfer backup data from the VM being protected directly to the Alike ADS. Please refer to the appropriate sections for more details.
Storage
Alike stores the vast majority of its data in the ADS (Alike Data Store). The location of the ADS can be configured at installation, and changed in the Alike Manager.
Please note: The ADS location must be available via CIFs to the Alike ABDs and Q-Hybrid targets. If you are using local storage for your Data Store, Alike will attempt to create a CIFs share for you. A high-performance CIFs share, such as through a NAS, may provide superior scalability to the share created by Alike.
The Data Store consists of several different elelements.
- BDB Files. These are large, logically contiguous files that grow up to 2GB (or larger, depending on your configuration) in size and contain deduplicated data. A new installation will initially create four BDBs, all well below 2 GB, and as backups are recorded, these four files will expand and new BDBs will be added. BDB space will be automatically reclaimed and reused internally, as possible. It is common to see the number of BDB files grow rapidly on the initial use then level off to a relatively static size/number over the course of several backups.
- DBs backup directory. After your first backup job completes, Alike will place certain critical metainformation about your settings, configuration, and backups in the DBs directory of your Data Store. These DBs will be necessary to recover from a damaged or lost Alike installation, along with the BDB files themselves.
- Jobs directory. This directory contains transient data used by Enhanced Backup and Enhanced Replicate jobs. This directory does not need to be backed up.
- RepCache directory The repCache folder stores all the cached information for Alike's Enhanced Replication jobs. Although it is not critical data to preserve, if lost it could cause the replication jobs to recreate their cache during the next run, slowing them somewhat.
- Temp directory Uses temporary storage for a few operations, and as the name implies, it stores them in the ADS temp folder. This folder can safely be excluded from backup.
Alike Backup Delegates
For ABD based backup jobs (XenServer only), Alike leverages a tiny virtual machine appliance called the Alike Backup Delegate (ABD). One ABD template is required per Xen resource pool. The ABD is deployed as a VM template to your shared SR. When a job is started, Alike will provision an ABD from the template to service the job, and destroy it when complete. In this way, Alike does not consume any memory, cpu or other resources when not in use. And even when in use, the ABDs take only 128MB of ram, and they all share the same 128MB disk image (per pool).
Please note, all versions of Alike are able to run both Enhanced and Q-Hyrid backup jobs. Hyper-V hosts are limited to Q-Hybrid based jobs at this time.
In Alike's ABD based backup jobs, the ABD performs data deduplication, compression and encryption at the source, dramatically decreasing I/O traffic between the ABDs and the Alike installation. You only need to deploy a single ABD template for each configured XenServer resource pool. Alike will automatically provision additional ABDs from this template as needed, one fore each concurrent backup job.
Q-Hybrid Backups
Alike's Q-Hybrid backup technology can be used as a powerful alternative to Enhanced based jobs, and is available in all versions of Alike, from the free edition to Alike DR and works with both Xen and Hyper-V. Q-Hybrid supports all modern versions of Windows guests for backup protection. Although they are 100% compatible with Enhanced backups, Q-Hybrid backups differ in a few critical ways:
- Fully support Microsoft VSS snapshotting for quiesced backups (even in Windows 2008R2 and up)
- Backups are performed in-guest, and no ABD is required.
- Backups are NTFS optimized, and can run considerably faster on sparse filesystems
- Can protect in-guest iSCSI mapped drives not visible to the hypervisor
Offsite Vaulting
Offsite Vaulting is a means to store secondary copies of your backup data in a secure offsite location. Vaulting is available only in Alike DR edition. To utilize Alike's Offsite Vaulting feature, you will need a CIFS compliant share in your offsite location for your remote backup data to be stored. Optionally, you may install the Alike Offsite Console at the remote site (or any location), to facilitate rapid restores.
The Offsite Vaulting Data Store will require sufficient storage to store the requested (deduplicated) VM backup versions. Please plan accordingly.
Please see the section on Offsite Vaulting for further details.
Recovery Installation
Alike offers a recovery installation option in the main Alike installation wizard that can assist you in recovering your Alike environment. The Recovery option can be used to connect a new installation of Alike to a pre-existing Data Store. This is useful if you are recovering your Alike server, or migrating Alike to a new host.
To perform a recovery install, you will simply need to provide a path to the ADS that is to be recovered. Once complete, Alike will recover all of your backups, configuration, and schedule history to your newly installed copy.
Data Storage
The data storage directory is the path to Alike's ADS. This will be the permanent location for all of Alike's backup data. This location must have sufficient space to store all of your backup data. The Data Store directory must be visible to the ABDs over CIFs. If you choose a local Data Store path, Alike will create a CIFs share for you. You must have Windows file sharing enabled in order for Alike to create the share correctly. If you select a remote CIFS share (NAS, Storage Server, etc), you will also be prompted to enter a username and password to access the share. You may use either a upn syntax (username@domain) or netbios (domain\username) for the user account.
Tip: Performance counts with your data store location. The faster the drives or network storage, the faster Alike can complete backup/restore jobs. A high-performance CIFs share, such as a NAS or dedicated storage server, is the best choice.
Note: Alike conducts most of its work in a Windows service, BackupScheduler.exe. This service must run a priviledged service account, provided during Alike installation. Incorrect credentials for this service account will result in the Alike services failing to start.
Offsite Settings.
If you have Alike DR licenses, you are able to configure an offsite data store for Alike to work with. First, click the Enable Alike DR Vaulting. An offsite data store (ODS) is a CIFS share that is routable from the Alike installation.