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Itegral's avatar
Itegral
Level 6
12 years ago

BMR vs Unix disk mirror

Could someone do a comparison between Symantec BMR and Unix disk mirroring.

This is in reference to a migration activity for Solaris OS to a new Data Centre. The current root partition of the hosts have resilient hard disks using Unix disk mirroring. I need to establish which of the above method will be effective, time-saving, and pragmatic.

The current architecture is NetBackup 7.5, Oracle RAC with AMS, SPARC M5000

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  • Yasuhisa_Ishika's avatar
    Yasuhisa_Ishika
    12 years ago

    You are compareing High Availability vs Disaster Recovery - these two is completely different.

    By disk mirroring, your system is protected from single disk failure. But disk mirroring does not protect your system from disaster incluing data loss by mis-operation.

    Whereas, system backup(BMR) does not provide high availability. BMR des not protect your system from disk failure - when disk failure occurs, the system may stop. But system backup provide you recovery point of your system. When system get corrupted, you can recovery your system from system backups.

    BMR is not aware of RAC. It just provide automated system recovery method. After recovery, you may need  some steps to get RAC work. You should make POC in test environment.

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  • Itegral's avatar
    Itegral
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    1 - I assume any Solaris 10 SPARC server would do i.e. T2000 can be a boot server for M5000?

    2 - Alternatively, my Master server is on Solaris 10 SPARC M5220, can it be a boot server for Solaris 10 SPARC T2000?

  • Yasuhisa_Ishika's avatar
    Yasuhisa_Ishika
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    Both T2000 and M5000 is sun4v architecture server. You can use T2000 as boot server fot M5000. But please note that BMR on control domain is not supported as I wrote before.

    T5220(right?) is also OK.

  • Itegral's avatar
    Itegral
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    Yes SPARC T5220.

    I have to recover SPARC T2000 and M5000 and also a Windows 2003 server. I am planning to use my NetBackup Master Solaris 10 SPARC T5220 as boot server for T2000 and M5000 and add another boot server to accommodate the Windows box.

    Is that OK to register a Windows boot server on Solaris 10 SPARC T5220 Master?

  • mandar_khanolka's avatar
    mandar_khanolka
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    BMR Boot server operating system platform needs to be of same platform as that of client OS being recovered.

    General Rule:

    BMR Boot server OS platform = Client OS platform

    BMR Boot server OS version >= BMR SRT OS version ~= Client OS version

     

    >> Is that OK to register a Windows boot server on Solaris 10 SPARC T5220 Master?

    No, You need x86 architecture m/c where you can setup a Windows OS to build BMR boot server on top of it. Windows is more flexible where above OS version and architecture (32/64 bit OS) rule is not applicable. I mean windows 2003 32-bit OS based boot server can protect windows 2008 R2 (64-bit) box as well.

    Also make a note that, sometimes dedicating a box for bmr boot server seems costly; especially in case where only couple of clients are to be protected for DR. In that case you can go with bmr media based recovery option. You can create a temporary bmr boot server on your NB client itself. Create an BMR SRT ISO and burn DVD and then disable BMR boot server back. Now whenever client goes off you can boot it over the BMR media and recover.

    Thanks.

    Mandar

  • Yasuhisa_Ishika's avatar
    Yasuhisa_Ishika
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    Is that OK to register a Windows boot server on Solaris 10 SPARC T5220 Master?

    OK, of cource!

  • mandar_khanolka's avatar
    mandar_khanolka
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    >> Is that OK to register a Windows boot server on Solaris 10 SPARC T5220 Master?

    BTW if you mean you are setting up another x86 windows box for boot server and want to register it with solaris sparc master server then it is absolutely fine.

    BMR master server can be of any supported OS platform. Only boot server is client os centric.

     

    Thanks.

    Mandar