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Pilbal
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16 years ago
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Need help restoring Sharepoint 2007 farm to test environment (Disaster Recovery)

I've been working on restoring our production SharePoint 2007 (MOSS & WSS) environment to a virtual test/development environment.  I've followed this document: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/290873.htm but I'm not having any luck making the farm operational.

First a bit about the environment.  Running Backup Exec 12.5 SP2 on Server 08 x64.  SharePoint farm is a single front end web server and a single back end database server, both on Server 03 x86.  Running SQL 05 back end.  There are roughly 20 individual web apps, most use port 80 with a host header.  My test environment is setup identical to production, using a domain controller restored from production, same netbios names, same windows service pack level, even the same directories/drives where SharePoint is installed.  I've done everything I can to replicate the envionment as closely as possible to match production.  

I'll start at the beginning.  The above document says this:
"Upon the recovery of the Windows server (after the last reboot) the SharePoint Server software is present but not functional."
What exactly is "present but not functional?"  And where should I stop in the SharePoint farm installation/deployment to make it "present but not functional" according to the Symantec document?  Do I run the configuration wizard after installing?  Do I update to match SharePoint version at the time of the backup?  Do I setup SSP and web applications?  I don't really care how far I have to go in deployment, as long as I can get a replica of the production environment on another server.

In steps 1-4 I have no problems restoring SQL system databases.  But do I setup the "present but not functional" SharePoint server before or after restoring system databases (if it matters)?

What happened to step 5?  It is missing from the document.

In step 6, I'm able to get the SharePoint SQL databases restored, but shouldn't it restore the IIS virtual directories?  If I have the IIS virtual directories already created, the restore process seems to remove them, including SSP.  Should the option "Preserve existing Internet Information Services (IIS) Web site and application pool (SharePoint 2007 only)"  have any affect on this?  It seems to not make a difference if this is selected or not. 

Step 7 the ConfigurationV3-DB restores without error.

Step 8 is self explanatory.

What happened to step 9?

Step 10, Global Settings and Single Sign-on restore successfully.

Regardless the outcome of the above steps, I always get an error when opening the central administration web site after step 10.   "Error"  "An unexpected error has occurred." 

If I run the configuration wizard at this point I have to go to "advanced settings" on the 3rd screen and specify "use this machine to host the web site" and then I receive this error on step 1:

Failed to initialize the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration.
An exception of type
Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException
was thrown. Additional exception information: A previous attempt to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies has failed. For more information about this failure, review the upgrade log on server <SERVERNAME> or review the SharePoint Timer service upgrade job status using the Central Administration Web Application. To retry upgrade, run psconfig.exe and specify the force parameter along with the upgrade command on server <SERVERNAME>.
Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException: Exception of type
'Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException' was thrown.
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskCommon.CheckIfUpgrading(TaskBase task)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.InitializeTask.Run()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()
 
And this is where I’m stuck. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear about them. If you need any additional info, don’t hesitate to ask.  I’ll be contacting Symantec support if I don’t get an answer here.

Thanks everyone!
  • I've been working on this for a while now and I think I know what's going wrong (at least partially).

    I used Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery and took a backup of our production SharePoint server and restored it to a virtual environment so I could better troubleshoot the production SharePoint server, without actually messing with the production environment.  Also I needed the snapshot feature in Hyper V.

    First thing I noticed is WSS SP1 (and no other sp) was installed but the configuration wizard never completed successfully.  The upgrade.log was reporting error "Invalid column name 'UserAccountDirectoryPath'" for various web applications.  I resolved this error by adding the 'UserAccountDirectoryPath' column to the 'sites' table in all content databases.

    Now the configuration wizard reported a different error: "The specified policy was not found."  After troubleshooting this error I discovered I could run "psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force –wait" and it would complete successfully.  Still, after running psconfig the configuration wizard failed with the same error.  So I installed MOSS sp1, WSS sp2, MOSS sp2 (in that order) canceling the configuration wizard after each service pack.  Then ran the same psconfig command.  The psconfig completed successfully and afterwards the configuration wizard completed successfully.

    Now that I have the SharePoint environment back to a clean state I will try another backup/restore using Backup Exec 12.5.  I'll report back with my results.
  • I've been working on this for a while now and I think I know what's going wrong (at least partially).

    I used Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery and took a backup of our production SharePoint server and restored it to a virtual environment so I could better troubleshoot the production SharePoint server, without actually messing with the production environment.  Also I needed the snapshot feature in Hyper V.

    First thing I noticed is WSS SP1 (and no other sp) was installed but the configuration wizard never completed successfully.  The upgrade.log was reporting error "Invalid column name 'UserAccountDirectoryPath'" for various web applications.  I resolved this error by adding the 'UserAccountDirectoryPath' column to the 'sites' table in all content databases.

    Now the configuration wizard reported a different error: "The specified policy was not found."  After troubleshooting this error I discovered I could run "psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force –wait" and it would complete successfully.  Still, after running psconfig the configuration wizard failed with the same error.  So I installed MOSS sp1, WSS sp2, MOSS sp2 (in that order) canceling the configuration wizard after each service pack.  Then ran the same psconfig command.  The psconfig completed successfully and afterwards the configuration wizard completed successfully.

    Now that I have the SharePoint environment back to a clean state I will try another backup/restore using Backup Exec 12.5.  I'll report back with my results.
  • After fixing my SharePoint issues I successfully restored 90% of the farm with BE12.5.  I was not able to restore ConfigurationV3-DB, Global Settings and Single Sign-on resouces.  I'll keep working on it but I think I'm over my hurdle for now.