About Bare Machine Recovery

23 January 2023

A Bare Machine Recovery (BMR) is the ability to recover a system, including the operating system, its configuration, applications running on the operating system, and its data back to a state it was at a given point.

Cohesity integrates with Cristie software to protect your servers for bare machine recovery (BMR). Cohesity supports two types of BMR:

Cristie Bare Machine Recovery (CBMR): In this integration, a separate schedule for BMR backup is required to be added to the protection policy.

First, a block-based protection run is executed followed by a separate BMR run. The BMR run is always Full (no incremental). For more information, see CBMR.
Cohesity Bare Machine Recovery (CoBMR): In this integration, CoBMR leverages Cohesity's file-based and block-based physical server protection. No separate BMR schedule or protection run is required. For more information, see CoBMR.

For BMR-based protection of a physical server, you must first install the Cohesity agent on the physical server followed by the BMR agent and register the physical server with the Cohesity cluster.
You can also deploy the Cohesity agent on a virtual machine and protect the VM as a physical server to perform BMR. For more information, see Deploy Cohesity Agent on Virtual Servers.

CBMR and CoBMR Comparison

Feature	CBMR	CoBMR
Supported physical servers	Windows Linux For more information, see Supported Software.	Windows Linux For more information, see Supported Software.
Protection Policy	You must add a BMR schedule to the policy.	Default Policy - No BMR schedules.
Protection Group	Block-based backup	File-based backup Block-based backup
Protection Run	First performs block-based protection run followed by a BMR run.	Leverages the physical file-based and block-based backup run (No separate BMR schedule)
System State Backup	For block-based backup: First Full followed by incremental backup. For BMR backup: Always full backup.	First full backup followed by incremental backup.
Recovery ISO	For Windows servers, you must install CRISP software and create a separate ISO. For Linux servers, Cristie provides pre-build recovery ISO.	Cristie provides pre-build recovery ISO.
Recovery Workflow	Initiate BMR recovery from Cohesity to fetch the recovery path (the SMB share has the “system.vtd” file, the Custom Virtual Device Driver file). Then mount the system.vtd file in the CBMR recovery wizard to complete the recovery.	Recovery is performed through CoBMR Recovery Environment.

Dataprotect Documentation