Users with Windows-based virtual machines may opt to use Alike’s unique Q-Hybrid technology. Q-Hybrid is a high-performance, dynamically deployed, agent-based approach which that exclusively from within the guests. This method allows Alike to protect your data using full VSS (quiesced) snapshots on any platform.
Q-Hybrid backups/replications offer advantages over the Enhanced (agentless) method, which can be quite compelling in some situations. Of course, you may switch your jobs between Enhanced or Q-Hybrid at any time since they are fully compatible with each other.
With a Q-Hybrid job, Alike will connect to the target system being protected via WMI/DCOM, and dynamically deploy its temporary backup agent for the job. Then, a VSS snapshot is taken for the backup/replication data, which will invoke any VSS aware writers (ie. Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Active Directory, etc.).
The backup will then run, deduplicating and sending the backup data directly to your ADS storage location. Once complete, Alike will remove the VSS snapshot, and clean out all temporary agent executables from the target system.
Q-Hybrid jobs are the benefit of being NTFS aware, so they are able to skip whitespace and deleted data, in many cases allowing for a much quicker backup. Additionally, they can fully protect any NTFS volumes present in the guest, even when they are not visible to the hypervisor host (eg. iSCSI drives).
To control the access and credentials for Q-Hybrid jobs, Alike utilizes Credential Profiles, which can be defined under Tools->Settings->Backup Settings->Credential Profiles. You can define one or many profiles with their credentials, and assign VMs to profiles as needed.
This will allow you to protect systems in multiple Active Directory domains or Workgroups centrally.
Please note: If no Profile is defined, Alike will utilize the Alike Service Account to access the remote systems for Q-Hybrid jobs.
Finally, Alike will attempt to dynamically detect the IP address of the targets of the backups via the hypervisor API. If Alike is unable to detect the IP, or you wish to specify a different IP, you can always assign an Access IP for a VM under that system’s configuration page in the System Explorer.
Note: For users of Alike Physical, all jobs run using Q-Hybrid.