For those who haven't learned (yet), MS in Win2K (and TSM in 5.1) have taken steps to address this; Win2K allows restore directly to existing C-drive, whereby the backup product brings down system objects in a way that gets them restored at the next reboot(except for the hardware specific pieces). This can be (and has been) scripted (by at least a few customers), in such a way that server recovery is possible -- the only limitation is TSM can only handle non-authoritative restore of Active Directory (and other "shared" registry/system objects).
Solaris has jump-start, HP has Ignition, AIX has mksysb -- they all have their limitations, but that just makes our life abit more interesting. One customer I helped deploy the old ADSM-pipe program to create a mksysb-like package for the Solaris' equivalent of rootvg (and he liked it alot!) Another customer engaged Sun professional services to script together the config's for their E10K nodes and E450's (about 40 machines) so they could periodically update a "standard image" jump-start CD (for each of the two machine types),,, last I heard, they were happy with that solution for their DR "server recovery" needs. At SHARE, IBM/Tivoli acknowledged they were working on a BMR solution for Win2K; no commitment to ever delivering said solution, but (at least) they're looking at it. Win2K is (essentially) the only platform that doesn't contemplate bare-metal restore in a mksysb-like fashion. For my customers, I still advise them to use NTbackup.exe for the System State backups (to a file that gets picked up by c$ incremental) -- in order to allow point-in-time, authoritative restore of system objects. We developed that approach (and discussed it, on this list) almost two years ago -- we certified it for point-in-time recovery of AD, DC's and Exchange Server in December, 2000. This stuff is a royal pain, but not exactly rocket-science... just takes proper funding and decisive commitment by platform-specific customer personnel. Don France Technical Architect -- Tivoli Certified Consultant Tivoli Storage Manager, WinNT/2K, AIX/Unix, OS/390 San Jose, Ca (408) 257-3037 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E. -- www.pacepros.com) -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Seay, Paul Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 10:46 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: BareMetalRestore The issue is actually more complex for IBM/Tivoli. They typically do not implement solutions that have potential integrity issues and they are targeted toward enterprise recoveries in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, none of the Disaster Recovery providers recommend BMR because of HAL issues in the windows world and it being much easier to guarantee a successful recovery for UNIX systems by restoring to an alternate drive and booting. What the DR providers do like is the mksysb of AIX. That is a great tool. Tivoli does recognize the fact that customers must have a bare metal recovery to identical hardware for windows. I do not know when, but they will eventually have a solution for this. I believe this is the convenience case. If you are a business partner, you should be making the business lost case to Tivoli because of the missing BMR capability. I encourage all business partners to make that plea with supporting documentation to Tivoli. Paul D. Seay, Jr. Technical Specialist Naptheon Inc. 757-688-8180 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 11:16 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: BareMetalRestore There is a problem: all other software, like Brightstor and Netbackup support this function. Since the windows users are getting more, we cannot ignore the requests from them. I lose about 4 case which Brightstor and Netbackup take these case because of the lack of this function. TSM is a very good solution, but is still not a complet solution. People do not think about the disaster and disaster recovery, they just think of convinient, especially they spend lots of money to build a solution. Mephi Liu -----Original Message----- From: Seay, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 5:07 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: BareMetalRestore IBM is the only company that provides this capability for its operating systems. Standalone restore on the mainframe, mksysb on AIX. These are included free with the OS. This is a OS vendor issue. They simply do not recognize the benefits of the capability and are not focused on SAR because they do not see it as a problem. The place that Tivoli needs to step in is make things like mksysb integrated as a special backup capability that and manage the associated media and provide a boot strap wrapper to invoke the native system's capability if the are ever created. Paul D. Seay, Jr. Technical Specialist Naptheon Inc. 757-688-8180 -----Original Message----- From: Gill, Geoffrey L. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 2:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: BareMetalRestore There has been a lot of discussion on bare metal restore with TSM and other products. It seems we're all held hostage to purchase expensive products that have this capability. Unfortunately in times like this we've all had our budgets cut, at least I have, and would like our software vendors, IBM/TIVOLI in this case, to make their products more robust. After all we do send them maintenance money for software updates and expect the product to get better. I'm just wondering how serious IBM is about getting TSM to "WORK" with the various OS software vendors, i.e. Microsoft, HP, Compaq, Sun and the like, to find out what it takes to get it's product to do bare metal restores. If TKG could make it work why can't IBM? Or don't these guys talk to each other? My little rant for the day!!!!! Geoff Gill TSM Administrator NT Systems Support Engineer SAIC E-Mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (858) 826-4062 Pager: (877) 905-7154
