Setting up a backup machine

[Peter Clarke]

Hi,

I have an ES40 that we have been using for years now and have just purchased a new ES40 to use as a backup machine.What i need to do is get the new machine running exactly the same as the original machine with all the same software etc... we don't really need all the data files.
What would be the best way to achieve this?

Thanks

[Volker Halle]

Peter,

just take a copy of the system disk (and the otehr disks eventually) from your old ES40 and copy it to your new ES40. When you start up the new ES40, make sure you are not connected to the network to prevent network address conflicts.

Volker.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Just clone the drives (BACKUP/IMAGE or BACKUP/PHYSICAL) shoudl do.

However... I'd urge you to take this opportunity to excercise the catastrophic recovery playbook.

What is the current procedure if the current box were to ever become unuseable?
Use that procedure on the target backup box!

Roll out those tapes!

Cheers,
Hein.

[Peter Clarke]

Would this take care of TCPIP, DECNET etc... or would i have to install these seperately?

[Jan van den Ende]

Peter,

Anything installed on the source system, will be at the copy.

However, ALL configs are also identical!

That might be your intention, but then you will have to make D**N sure that those systems will ***NEVER*** be able to "see" each other on whatever circuit!!
You can also temporarily isolate them, and then configure nodename, network adresses, disknames, custer ID, etc somewhat differently.
After that, you can setup things to, eg, be reachable from the same terminal (or emulator).

Also, when the copied system is on line, you will want to put its own licenses in its LMM database. :-)

hth

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Yeah, if your backups are correctly made, and the restores properly done, then everything should come back.

And that's exactly what the earlier warnign was about... you probably do NOT want a second node on the network claiming the same name/numbers.

Anyway, the tricky part are probably the device and be device names
- Same network interface? EWxx vs EIxx
- Same hard-drive? DRxx vs DKxx ?

A bit more or less memory, or an CPU more or less will not make a functional difference but may require node specific tuning.

A typically a VMS configuration is NOT dependent on Serial numbers or MAC addresses, but your application might be.

In fact, in light of the earlier warning, you MIGHT want to construct a dependency in the boot process on a known configuration feature or environment variable (firmware!). Thus the system boot procedure could possibly detect whether it is 'home' or on an alternate config and behave accordingly.
Sorry, I haven't thought this through in enough detail to provide you with details.

Hein.

[Peter_364]

Peter,

That's partly depending on how your storage is attached, if it's "local" SCSI-storage you could do as others have mentioned, but if you got fibre-channel storage you could set up boot-path to the very same system disk as the original ES40 uses, but never boot it as the original is up and running.
And you could also configure the backup-machine with the same exact hardware and number of ethernet interfaces and connect them the same so the backup machine will match these like the original if and when it has to replace the other.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

None of my applications could do something with such a backup system. I hope you have something to do the roll forward of the data (replay all changes since backup). Or have applications without data.

fwiw

Wim

[Peter Clarke]

Ok i have now managed to do this seem to have a few errors though.
How do i change the hostname and ip address of the server?

Thanks

[Robert Gezelter]

Peter,

I do not see which TCP/IP stack is in use. If it is a recent version of TCP, then the TCPIP$CONFIG.COM command procedure. One can also do this change manually, but it is easier and simpler to use the command procedure.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com