Standard Configuration Overview
Alike offers high performance backup and replication features using our Enhanced (agentless) and Q-Hybrid (agent-based) technologies.
Below are a few typical deployment configuration options available for Alike:
Physical Alike (ADS on NAS)
Alike Services: Physical Host
ADS: NAS CIFS Share
In this configuration, the Alike services are installed on a physical Windows machine, separate from the virtualized environment. Additionally, the ADS is located on a CIFS share residing on a separate NAS or storage device.
This configuration provides the highest degree of flexibility and scalability.
It also offers several additional benefits:
- The Alike services are not part of the virtualized environment they are protecting. This offers insulation from virtualization failures, and affords the fastest possible recovery time since the Alike installation would not need to be recovered in the event of a hypervisor/SAN failure.
- This also provides scalability benefits, as the ADS is isolated from the Alike services and the two do not affect each other.
- Additionally, the storage system hosting the ADS can be scaled separately to meet the backup demands.
Physical Alike (ADS Local)
Alike Services: Physical or Virtual Windows computer
ADS: Local to Alike Server (Windows Share)
For less demanding installations, the Alike services and ADS can be installed on the same machine. This machine can be either physical or virtual. This can be a simple and convenient method as it reduces the number of required systems to single host.
Although the scalability might be less than providing a physically separate ADS, this configuration should be sufficient to handle most small to medium sized environments.
This configuration can be ideal for customers looking to only use Enhanced Replication, since ER jobs do not require any additional storage. In this case, Alike can be installed on a very small Windows virtual machine (even a workstation OS) with no significant local storage.
For further information on Enhanced Replication requirements and recommendations, please see the section on Enhanced Replication
.
Virtual Alike (ADS on NAS)
Alike Services: Virtual Machine
ADS: NAS CIFS Share
The following configuration provides many of the performance and scalability benefits of configuration 1, and the convenience of running the Alike Services on a virtual machine. Much of the I/O intensive work for a backup job is during data processing, which is performed either by the ABD or the Q-Hybrid agent.
By offloading the ADS to a high performance storage system, you can gain a high degree of scalability, even while the Alike server runs as a virtual machine.
The downside of running the Alike services in a virtual machine is that in the event of a total virtual system failure, Alike would need to be recovered/installed to another system to begin restores. For more information about recovering in such a situation, please refer to the Admin Guide under Recovery Installation.
Furthermore, the background data processing, such as data validation, is always performed by the Alike server itself, and can be slower on a some virtual environments.
