SUMMARY
Explains Windows agent install options.
ISSUE
Windows core and bare metal agents
There are two Windows agents; the “core” agent (32- or 64-bit) and the bare metal agent.
Many physical systems should have both agents installed; however, it is not necessary to install the bare metal agent to implement Windows integrated bare metal protection (supported in Unitrends version 7.4 and later). The core agent performs backup and restore operations. The bare metal agent is required to create bare metal boot media to use for image-based bare metal restore. If you are not using integrated bare metal protection, install the bare metal agent so you can use image-based bare metal protection. For a comparison of these Windows bare metal options, see this topic in the Recovery-Series and UEB Administrator's Guide: Windows Hot Bare Metal Protection.
When protecting Hyper-V guests with Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Sharepoint, or Oracle 11g installed, you need to install the core agent, but not necessarily the bare metal agent. You will have two options in this case: Install both agents and treat the guest as if it were a physical machine (performing bare metal backups), or install only the core agent to backup application data, while still doing host-based backups of your VMs through Hyper-V (note that this does not apply to VMware VMs thanks to application aware backups for VMware).
To install the Windows agents
You can install the Windows agents in these ways:
- Manually by downloading the agents from the Latest Agents Releases web page and following this procedure in the Recovery-Series and UEB Administrator's Guide: Manually installing the Windows agents.
- Automatically using the agent push feature. Agents are pushed to supported Windows environments when you add the Windows client to the Unitrends appliance using the Establish trust credentials option in the Legacy UI. In the New UI under Configure - Protected Assets you select the assets you wish to update and click on Update Agent - Update Selected or Update All . For push install requirements and procedures, see this topic in the Recovery-Series and UEB Administrator's Guide: Push installing the Windows agents.