About dissimilar system restore
A dissimilar system restore (DSR) restores a protected Windows client to a new system that has a different hardware configuration.
Note:
Changes in the hardware configuration may prevent clustered resources from going online after a restore. BMR does not attempt to adjust clustered resource attributes to account for a dissimilar system restore.
A DSR is useful in the following situations:
You change the preferred vendor for a class of systems in your enterprise.
You migrate an application from older hardware to the newer hardware.
Your system experiences critical hardware failure and similar hardware is not available for replacement.
Your disaster recovery provider does not have identical hardware to yours at the disaster recovery site.
You stage and verify an application at a test site with different hardware from the production site. (You can migrate the application from test to production.)
Use DSR when any of the following conditions apply:
The target system has a disk controller that the protected system does not have.
The target system has a network card that the protected system does not have.
The target system requires a different hardware abstraction layer (HAL) or kernel than the protected system.
The target system has different TCP/IP settings than the protected system has. (Only TCP/IP properties are restored. Other networking properties, such as Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX), are not restored and must be configured after the restore.)