Quest Software has announced that vRanger 6.0, the latest version of its virtual data protection solution which provides backup, replication, and recovery for VMware, now also enables customers to back up and restore physical Windows servers.
vRanger is among Quest Software’s flagship products and one of the reasons it has caught on is that it embraced the VMware APIs, becoming very tightly coupled with the APIs that VMware endorsed and shipped, Greg Davoll, senior director, product marketing, data protection business, at Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In addition, it is agentless by nature so it can be deployed very quickly and customers can get it up and running, deriving productivity and use out of it in minutes, not hours, he notes.
However, according to Davoll, Quest has found that many organizations to date have needed to deploy separate best of breed backup products to protect their physical and virtual machines. “We feel that we can reduce the complexity and reduce the number of tools used in a Windows environment that is using VMware,” Davoll says. Providing a single source of protection for both virtual and physical environments, vRanger 6.0 is VMware Ready certified for vSphere 5, provides OS support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and also will support Windows Server 2012 upon its release to market.
Quest has integrated the new Windows support into the vRanger product so it is part of the UI, says Davoll. By enabling support for physical Windows servers from the same interface, the learning curve is “vastly reduced,” says Sheldon D’Paiva, lead product manager for vRanger. And, notes Davoll, “If we make it easier to manage both then it is going to be less costly over time in a variety of ways.” In addition, D’Paiva says, features like the integrated catalog and file level restore have been extended to the Windows environment as well.
vRanger 6.0 enables physical server backup by deploying distributed agents that send data directly from source to repository. With distributed agents, says D’Paiva a single bottleneck is eliminated, as well as extra hops, translating ultimately into scalability.
In addition, vRanger 6.0 provides application consistent snapshot backups for Microsoft applications, such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Active Directory via Microsoft’s VSS. At many organizations, the reasons that there are still physical machines is because they have very critical applications running on them, so when it comes to Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and SQL Server, he notes, “We use VSS to make sure we back up the applications consistently.”
vRanger 6.0 now also features new French and German language support, in addition to existing Japanese and Chinese support, delivering increased usability to customers in those countries.
vRanger 6.0 will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. For complete product details, go to www.quest.com.