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DR0701
Level 5

I have recently been tasked with the establishment of an IT Disaster Recovery plan for my company, part of which was the best way of protecting our Small Business Server 2003 installation.

Whilst I have been using Backup Exec in its various guises (Veritas and Symantec) for quite a few years, and I was more than happy to purchase and use this to protect the corporate environment, I also decided to add an extra level of protection, especially as a Small Business Server installation contains so many critical applications in one physical box.

It was for this reason that I started to look into products which would take a complete image of the SBS server, of which there are several good candidates in the marketplace.  To enable me to do this, I did some research and from that drew up a list of appropriate products.  I then made up a checklist of important items I’d need to gauge for each, including:

  • Ease of installation/use
  • Cost
  • Easy to understand licensing structure
  • Software features

The first thing I had to do was set up a replica of our SBS and data servers on VMWare ESXi instances, ensuring that the IP subnet was changed to something completely different – I didn’t want to muck up our corporate environment before I’d even started the server imaging project!

Once the virtual environment was set up, I took a snapshot of the SBS server so I could roll back once I was finished testing and documenting each product, rather than having to spend time and effort uninstalling software.  It also meant that I would have a completely clean slate to work from, rather than finding remnants of old software lurking – you never know when a registry entry might affect another piece of software, thus clouding judgement unfairly.  I then downloaded each product in turn, including any additional agents, options and/or software.

Once each product was installed along with any additional software, this was documented for future reference, rather than having to do it all over again, and a test full backup of the SBS server was set up and taken, the data destination being a share on the virtualised data server.  Unfortunately, with the virtual environment in ESXi, I was not able to test holding the recovery images on USB hard drives.

Notes were taken at each stage to enable comparison between the various packages, and scores out of 10 for each item give (this may seem like overkill, but it helps greatly when coming to a final decision – notes are all well and good, but having a score for each item can sometimes give you a better idea of how good or bad something is).

I didn’t think there would be too much of a difference between the various software packages, but I was proved wrong.  With one package in particular, what should really have been one download and installation procedure seemed to take forever, together with sub-par documentation and multiple installations to get the required software up and running.  It also came a cropper re. features for Small Business Server, which was critical to my tests.

Additional snapshots of the server were taken before the fun part of the process – testing the restore function of each software package.

The restore part was made a little more awkward and difficult because of trying to boot the virtual machines to a CD – however, my way around this was to create .iso images of the recovery boot CDs and allow the virtual machines to boot from them, rather than using physical CDs.  This also meant much less swapping of CDs and much quicker boot times.

Once this particular hurdle had been overcome, the server recovery process using each product was then evaluated and documented, again to save time in the future.

The server was started up using the boot CD, the network configured, and then the server restored using the image from the virtualised data server.  It was then restarted and checked to make sure that the restoration process had completed successfully.

Throughout all the tests that were carried out, I found that Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery scored best.  Where some of the other products fell by the wayside regarding their documentation or their confusing installation procedures, BESR consistently impressed me, and this was the product I ended up purchasing to protect our SBS 2003 server.  As I am the supervisor for a group of companies, and I will be looking at IT Disaster Recovery procedures for each company in the group, I will have absolutely no hesitation in recommending and implementing the software across the different networks.

It also helps that, having come from using Backup Exec extensively, the GUI for System Recovery has a familiar feel and look to it.

I can now sleep more easily at night in the knowledge that if something does go horribly wrong, then I should be able to recover our SBS server much more quickly and easily than if I were using another product.

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Last update:
‎04-06-2009 12:08 PM
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