Disaster Recovery Planning for Callmanager 4.1

[BoredSting]

I am trying to create a disaster recovery plan for my Callmanager 4.1 implementation.

I have looked at the various documentation sets online at Cisco and have come to the conclusion that they never really planned for a disaster.

But even a complete failed system isn't planned for all that well. BARS appears to be a good way to recover the system if you have a standby installed call manager to do the restore.

Otherwise, it looks like a 8 hour plus restore from the time its called in to cisco.

Unity apparently supports (and if you read it closely stronyly recommends) using 3rd party backup agents for the SQL/Exchange/System to protect the system.

I know with my Arcserve system, i could bare metal the unity box in about an hour and half. It seems ludicrous to me that they havent come up with anything better than get an additional subscriber to be redundant.

So what things have people done to protect their environments.

 

[ErrorMagnet]

Have been thinking exactly the same thoughts as you, but have no 100% perfect solution.

However, I've been implementing CCM-clusters combined with Thirdparty-systems, where I once in a while brought down and Ghost'ed all servers at the same point in time. Had no problem restoring those Ghost Images to their source servers. A similar and more rapid solution, will be to let the server RAID's build the complete images on extra sets of Harddisks. But then: - WARNING - Be EXTREMELY avake when deciding which disksets should be inserted when powering up the servers, an which sets to be inserted afterwards!!

I'll be very thankful if anyone have comments on this, or more streamlined solutions to add.