Is VMWare 6.5 supported on AppAssure?

Question

We are looking to upgrade our VMWare environment to 6.5 (ESXi, VCenter and everything else) within the next few weeks. We currently have a VMWare environment of 5.1 and using AppAssure version 5.4.3.106? This Core is currently backing up 7 VM's and 13 physical machines within our environment. So with that said, I have some questions about compatibility: 
 1. Is VMWare 6.5 supported on AppAssure Core 5.4.3.106? 
 2. Is Windows 2016 supported on AppAssure Core 5.4.3.106? 
 3. I have looked at the current release notes for 5.4.3.106 and do not see either mentioned, so my guess is that neither is supported. 
 If that is correct, can I upgrade from AppAssure Core 5.4.3.106 to Rapid Recovery 6.1.1 directly? If so, do I just download the new RR 6.1.1 upgrade and run it on my current AppAssure Core (Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter (VM), 16 Gb RAM)? Will this upgrade the Core and repositories automatically? I don't want it to automatically do the Agents, as these are File & Exchange Servers that would have to be scheduled for restarts. 
 
 Thank you for your assistance. 
 Scott

Tudor.Popescu · Accepted Answer

Hi Scott: Sadly, the short answer is No, No and Of course Not. However, Rapid Recovery 6.1.1.137 supports (partially) VMWare 6.5 and Windows 2016 (without SecureBoot for now). 
 To better understand the limited support for VMWare 6.5 please see the Release Notes excerpt below: 
 Beginning with release 6.1, Rapid Recovery provides limited support for vSphere/ESXi 6.5. Unless otherwise indicated, functions supported for ESXi 6 now work for ESXi 6.5. Read the following details carefully for a full understanding. The following functions are supported: &bull; Protection of virtual machines on ESXi 6.5 &bull; Replication of recovery points from ESXi 6.5 &bull; Virtual export of recovery points to ESXi 6.5 
 The following limitations exist: &bull; You cannot export a virtual machine to vCenter/ESXi 6.5 if the source machine uses the Secure Boot option. &bull; When protecting virtual machines agentlessly on ESXi 6.5, you cannot protect encrypted VMs, which require VDDK 6.5. This limitation does not apply if the VM has the Agent software installed. Support for this feature is expected in Rapid Recovery release 7.0.0 and later, which includes an upgrade to VDDK 6.5. &bull; When protecting virtual machines agentlessly on ESXi 6.5, transfer does not work if the transport mode is set to SAN (storage area network). The SAN transport mode option is only available for agentless protection. 
 In general, new features specific to ESXi 6.5 may not function and are not supported until the VDDK is updated and tested in a future release of Rapid Recovery. 
 Generally speaking, RR 6.1.1.137 has a lot of performance and reliability improvements compared to 5.4.3 and upgrading is recommended. Please note that if you do so, you need to plan for a full repository check (actually, you need to plan even a longer time as the repository structure is modified AND a full repository check is performed). However, according to most customers I worked with, it is well worth. An example -- I have a customer that needs to replicate one machine with over 2TB of data on a 300-500KB/s unreliable connection. After upgrading, we started the replication. This was on Feb 24. The replication is going strong to this day (69% completed this morning). The connection is so poor that when connected over RDP, it fails after each mouse click. Before upgrading the replication was failing on a daily basis. 
 
 Click on the image to better see it. 
 Hope that this helps.