Recovering at Sungard, need some tips

[David Ritts]

Hey guys, here is a tough one. I have been charged with orchastrating a disaster recovery at sungard disaster recovery services. They will supply me with a K box, but not a K460 that is identical to mine. I think that I want to use Ignite Make Recovery to restore core OS from the tape, and then reload omniback 3.0 and my omniback database, and finally my most recent backup. However Sun tells me that a 10.20 os will be installed when we arrive, so am I better off just configuring their systm to look like ours using the command line and then restoring OBII..The DB and the most recent tape?..Or Should I blow their system away, use ignite and create from there..?? Any help appriciated.. Thanks.. Kev

[Stefan Farrelly]

We go to another companies site regularly and disaster recover our servers - mainly K-class. We always use ignite to restore them. Surely thats the point, to be able to replicate your own servers at a remote site. The safest and easiest way to do this is use ignite - not have someone else setup a server for you first and you to have to go to all the effort of setting it up how yours are - this would involve a lot of detailed docmentation and work.

[Brian M. Fisher]

I have successfully recovered the only two K-class servers I have tried at SunGard in Philly. The first time, I recovered a K580 to a K580 using a make_recovery tape and my omniback tapes for all non vg00 data. The second time I recovered a K460 onto a K580 again using a make_recovery tape for vg00 and OmniBack tapes for the balance. If you are interested in my detailed recovery process please E-mail me.

Even though HP states you can NOT recover a K460 onto a K580 with a make_recovery tape, it worked fine for me.

Brian
<*(((>< er
Brian.Fisher@LMBerry.com

[Rick Wilson]

Kevin,

I have successfully recovered an H70 to K400 and a K570 to a T500 without any problems using the ignite tapes. Only problem I had was when using ignite, it does NOT recognize fiber cards when it boots up. We had Comdisco set up our servers with 300 GB of EMC disk connected via fiber, and when the system was booted off tape, guess what, all I saw was the internal disk.

So anyway to answer you original question, ignite is the way to go. I even went as far to set up my lvm stuff via ignite. I have this if you need it. Send me an email at jlangston@familydollar.com and I'll be glad to share it with you.

Cheers,

Jim

[wyan lowe]

a couple of notes:

could do a search of this site on "make_recovery" for more info

1) make sure your Kboxes already have installed the "HWE" patches.
check www.software.hp.com/ & look for HareWare Extension Patches

On our kboxes, that turns out to be
XSW800HWCR1020 B.10.20.41 Extension Software Patch Bundle

this helps in booting the "make_recovery" tape onto potentially different hardware...
this gets into the "cloning" issue, official support issue, INSTALL/WINSTALL/VINSTALL kernel, etc...

2) do the "make_recovery -Avi" to create the bootable dds tape
(using a dds3 tapedrive & dds3 tapes, assuming sungard will provide dds3 tape drive)

make sure you're using the "latest" version of Ignite...
I used 2.4.307, but I think 2.5 is out...(check for patches too...)

3) boot off the "make_recovery" tape @ sungard
using the menu interface, select a disk (other than the 1 they will "preinstall" for you) to install vg00 on

4) it'll boot twice
5) it'll get to "OK" hopefully...
6) it'll start up & probably get lots of errors in the startup since /sbin/init.d scripts probably point to applications that are stored on vg's not yet created on the new box. don't worry.....or interrupt the boot after the "ok" and go into single-user mode, make changes to /etc/rc.config.d/(bunch-of-files), then shutdown -r or maybe init 3

6.5) recreate LVM structures from before
you may have to cd /dev/vgXX
and remove files like lvol, rlvol... in order to do "vgcreate, lvcreates"
make_recovery recovers them (the latest versions have restore=yes)
and their presence may interfere with recreating new lvols/vgs/etc...

6.6) maybe need to add drivers into the kernel for new hardware@sungard...

7) swremove omniback (our case vg00's /opt contained the omniback software, but the database was in another filesystem in another vgXX because it was several Gigs)

8) swinstall omniback v3 from cdrom
9) install latest patches for omniback (5 of them)
10) must perform "update hosts..." via xomni GUI to fully apply the patches...see the readmes in the patches
11) can verify that omniback's binaries are patched via "-version" switch... (i.e. omnir -v, and the build# should be greater than it was right after a newinstall...)

12) begin the restore of the omniback database via * textbook proceedures* which are very clear and need to be followed.
a) configure a Tape device in xomni
b) import a DLT containing the omniback database backup
c) perform database restore via xomin - specify filesystem/path to restore to. default is /tmp, but if your db is several Gigs, then /tmp on vg00 probably can't hold it...create new VG/LV/FS if needed
d) shutdown omniback
e) mv olddb, mv newdb
f) startup omniback
g) should be able to begin restore of data via GUI or can try "omnir" command line with switches....might save you time clicking/mousing around, or might end up causing more problems...


if you use mc/sg, maybe
couple things to check:
/etc/rc.config.d/cmcluster, set autostart=0
/etc/lvmrc, autostart vg's
use ifalias patch to bind multiple ip's to an interface, instead of trying to recreate 1 node cluster...or try to recreate 1node cluster (cmapplyconf)...

[wyan lowe]

Brian Fisher's notes via email were also very helpful!

[Duane Gorder]

Kevin,
If you are not comfortable using the Make Recovery tape, try putting a copy of some important information into a single directory that you can restore easily at DR test time, then copy them into the proper place when you are ready. Also include a copy of kernel parameters in this directory. We use a directory called /Disaster_Recovery which is very obvious and self-documenting. I have attached a basic list of things to keep in that directory. The ignite make recovery sounds easier, but it is not the only possibility.