Can I make an Ignite/Golden image for vg01 only?

[Steven E. Protter]

I would like to make an image that includes vg01 only. Thats my software and data.

The purpose is to distribute my oracle configuration without re-imaging the OS(vg00)

Can I do that?

If I make a tape like this...
/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av -x inc_entire=vg01

How would I recovery only vg01 without changing anything on vg00?

How would I make a golden image of only vg01.

Current golden image create is...

nohup /usr/contrib/bin/make_sys_image -s local -d /images -u &

What's wrong with my approach? How would you go about it.

Also, my golden image stubbornly refused to transfer /etc/nsswitch.conf How do I make sure its included in the image and ends up on the client/target machine?


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Steven E. Protter

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Yes, you could include only VG01 in a make_tape_recovery, BUT if / when you tried to boot from the tape I have the feeling it would kill your VG00 that is already there.

Ignite is not really designed for anything besides VG00.

What you want to do is more easily accomplished with just plain old tar, cpio, fbackup, whatever.

Once you get a machine up from your golden image, just recreate your vg01 (via scripts if you like), pop a tape in or pull a file from another machine, and restore your vg01 image.

[Helen French]

I 've not tried this, but I may think about some alternatives:

1) If it's *necessary* to use Ignite method for backing vg01, then create recovery tapes with vg00 and vg01. You can enter two "inc_entire" options with vg00 and vg01. In this case, I would make sure that both VGs can be fit in a single media. If not, you can exclude some directories with "exclude" option.

2) If it's not necessary to use Ignite method, then create normal recovery tape of vg00 and use normal backup methods for vg01 (fbackup, cpio, tar etc).

[Brian M Rawlings]

Like Patrick, I'm not sure why VG01 needs to be handled with Ignite. The purpose behind Ignite image tapes is to cover the myriad special cases required for boot volume recreation.

Once you don't have those to worry about, copying files and directories in perfect form, with no changes, should be possible with normal utilities or standard backups.

In fact, one "best practices" restore test (the acid test for backups) that I recommend is to do a full restore onto a test box, from time to time. Most people find that useful to do anyway, so that their DEV platforms have semi-current data from which to test. Many of my customers have come to rely on a weekly restore to DEV, to both check their backups, and to keep DEV data relatively current.

so I know that this works, down to the last space or period, for everything up to terabyte databases.

If you have some special case which requires an absolute image of a VG other than the root/boot volume, maybe we can offer suggesitons, but I'm afraid I may be missing what that is.

Remember that the files contained in VG00 or VG01 are contained on the ignite tape in tar/pax format anyway, nothing really special about that. It's the 'dd' of the special parts of the boot volume at the front of the tape that make ignite special, along with the bootable nature of the media.

Regards, --bmr

[Steven E. Protter]

Just an example.

I had to Ignite a whole box to move an Oracle ias config to a new machine.

The tar method ended up with a lot less data on the target than was supposed to be there.

Don't know why.

I didn't think Ignite could do what I needed. I suppose I could find a way to build my ias isntall into .depot files, then I'd be golden.

SEP

[John Payne_2]

Are the disks on a SAN? If so, could you consider a type of snap copy?

We Can take a snap copy and present it to another machine as a new lun. Then I do a vgchgid on the lun, and do a vgimport. After activating the volume, it's just a matter of mounting filesystems on the VG's LV's.

Now that I am thinking about it, this may be possible with mirrordisk. I've never tried it, but it will be something I'll definitely have to try. (Mirror vg01, pull one of the disks, mount onto a different machine, then try the vgchgid stuff...) I don't have time in the very near future, but I would be interested in hearing if anyone else tries.

Hope it helps

John

[Pradeep_3]

You can take full backup of vg00 and vg01 using ignite. In case the data is more than one tape, it will ask for another tape. And then restore on another server.

Paresh

[Heiner E. Lennackers]

Hi,

a golden image is a bootable image (to birn on CD for example). It makes no sense to make a golden image of vg01 without vg00 (if vg00 is your boot-vg).
You can just burn it on CD if you do not need exact user and permission infos. Or you can burn a tar-image for example.

[Bill Hassell]

Ignite is definitely the wrong tool for this task since the first part of the recovery tape task is to blow away the boot area and record new bootup information. Specifying vg01 as the only included VG will probably cause make_tape_recovery to create a minimum vg00 set of files plus the vg01 volume. Restoring it will probably make the vg01 disk bootable--definitely not what you want.

As others have mentioned, to copy a non-VG00 volume, just use a good backup tool (fbackup is the fastest and moswt relaible). tar and cpio will get you in trouble if there are any big files on the source.

[Brian M Rawlings]

Steven: I don't know why tar didn't work, other than the issues that Bill points out, regarding large files (over 2GB). Other than that, the tar command normally does a good job of picking up everything specified, including subdirs and their files, as far down as they go. The one exception that comes to mind is links, I don't think tar handles those well in all cases, and Oracle uses scads of links, I seem to recall.

So, the only thing I might add to Bill's post is that you must have 'pax' loaded, if you use Ignite. check as follows:

#> whereis pax
pax: /sbin/pax /usr/bin/pax /usr/share/man/man1.Z/pax.1
#>

You might use 'what /sbin/pax' to check rev and patch level, to make sure it is current. If you aren't an fbackup user, 'pax' would be a good 2nd choice, for HP-supported utilities. The 'pax' utility also has some issues with links, if the file names are over 100 characters long, and maybe other limitations, but is generally newer and better than 'tar'. I suspect you know all this, I'm just trying to be thorough. Sorry if I'm overdoing it.

Either way, as Bill says, Ignite is the wrong tool, but there are several which should do what you are trying to do. Hope you have good success with them.

Best Regards, --bmr