Quickest was to recover a dead server.

[rogerpatel]

Hi looking for some advice with regards to basic disaster recovery on servers.

I manage a number of clients who have at the most three servers, maybe two dc’s and 1 exchange server, some of the clients have single sbs 2003 servers.

All the Hardware for all servers is HP Proliant ML350’s with Raid 5 on a smart array.

All servers are backed up by Brightstore Arcserve, this includes using the relavent agents, for example for Exchange 2003 we would use a Brightstore Exchange Agent and a Windows Agent to ensure the complete server will be backed up.

All our backup units are HP Ultrium’s.

So, we have full backups of all servers, but to recover a server manually takes a long time, and can be a pain.

I’m looking for suggestions as to what would be the quickest way to recover a dead server, for example let’s say we had a SBS 2003 server and the HARDWARE died, and classed as totally unusable.

I have a identical backup spare server, the hardware is 100 % the same as the previous dead server.

I now need to get the client up and running ASAP.

Is there any software that can make my life much easier if the worst was to happen?

I’ve searched around and found utils like Symantc Ghost but they seem pretty ugly to setup.

Ideally I’d like to backup the complete server to some sort of device/tape/harddisk, etc so I could immediately get the server up and running.

I hope the above makes sense and you can see what I’m trying to achieve here, I’d love to know what everyone uses just in case there was a disaster?

Thanks in advance.

Roger

 

[mbourne2006]

Hi

Investigate "Cristie Bare Machine Recovery"

http://www.cristie.com

It may be just what you're looking for.

I use it with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager as a back-end, but it is supposed to be able to use locally-attached storage just as easily.

HTH


Kind Regards,
Matthew Bourne
"Find a job you love and never do a day's work in your life.

 

[rogerpatel]

Thanks,

just spoke to Cristie and it not ideal as it only recovers the OS, after this we would need to restore Exchange etc.

Any other tips

 

[mbourne2006]

Well, that's not strictly true. CBMR is *designed* to perform OS recovery I agree, but you can configure it to perform a complete image of every partition on your server. I have direct experience of this method of backup and recovery. You can obtain a free trial version of their software by download, and try for yourself.



Kind Regards,
Matthew Bourne
"Find a job you love and never do a day's work in your life.

 

[dublin101]

symantec livestate recovery..............restore anywhere option

you can even restore it to alternative hardware............we backup up our DC to a PIII workstation for testing and it worked fine..............for the same hardware, you'll be back up and running within 20 minutes or so...........

it backs up the whole system, including everything on it.