Ignite backups/restores

[Joe Venturelli]

I have a large D class system that I have a full ignite backup from, and a smaller D Class system which I am getting ready to put an equal amount of disk space in.

Whats the procedure to restore the ignite backup to a blank system (blank meaning a new clean/ No OS hard drive)

Is this even possible?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Joe:

This is the kind of thing one does when establishing a system at a disaster recovery site. You *can* definitely take a make_tape_recovery tape of one server of a particular class and install it on another server of the same class.

I'd do the following to capture vg00:

# make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00 -I -v -a /dev/rmt/0mn

The '-I' option specifies an interactive session when you later boot from the tape you created.

It will take about 45-minutes just to load the golden image from the Ignite tape. All displayed messages will be written to /var/opt/ignite/local/install.log.

Choose the Advanced Installation mode. This will give you the ability to select and control filesystem properties and/or choose whether or not you want to manually run /sbin/set_parms to setup the hostname and networking characteristics after the initial Ignite or during the Ignite session.

Map files on your volume groups were captured by the make_tape_recovery process, and included on the tape you created. The Ignite recovery will attempt to 'vgimport' using these specifications. Usually, this will fail due to different and/or missing device files on a different server. You will see a block-letter "FAILURE" message at the end of the ignition for this reason, but you *will* have a viable vg00. Review the install.log to confirm and review the actual issues.

Make sure you have a current version of Ignite. You can download one from here:

http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/download.html

...JRF...

[John Bolene]

As JRF said, we use
# make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00 -I -v -a /dev/rmt/0mn

to make a backup of vg00 (all the file systems are in vg00 for this reason) and then use the image to either clone the server (we use the no intervention method and after the machine reboots, go in and change anything that needs changing before plugging in the network cables) or for use in rebuilding the server in case of a hard drive failure.

We have used this to clone over 100 machines since they are almost identical.