CASO questions

[Ed_Newman]

Hi All, we are looking to open a new standby data centre (DC) for use in Disaster recovery purposes.  We currently backup everything in our live Data Centre using BackupExec 15.

The standby by DC will only have a couple of backup jobs created, the main requirements is that we can quickly restore virtual servers that have been backed up in the live DC into this environment.    We are looking to implement CASO, but reading the manual, if we choose the centrally managed option with unrestricted access to catalogues and replicated it looks like logs and catalogues are only copied from the managed server to the central server.  What we need is all the catalogues and jobs available on the managed server so should the live site not be available we can restore into the DR site quickly.  Is this possible?  And how to you set it up?

Thanks!

Ed. 

[CraigV]

Have you looked at the replicated option? Might be a better option. be aware that if you centralise your catalogs/job information and the CASO dies, your MMS witll effectively stop working.

The other option to look into is optimized dedupe?

Thanks!

[Ed_Newman]

Hi Craig thanks for your reply.  Looking at the BE manual it implies that the replication option only replicates the logs from the managed server (i.e. the managed server keeps its logs locally AND sends them to the central server) and does not replicate the catalogues and logs of the central server up to the MMS?  Also, if the CASO dies, I thought you could promote the MMS to a full server?

Thanks for your help so far! 

[CraigV]

No, if the CASO dies and you have centralised everything on that, the MMS dies too. Services wont start up and jobs won't run.

I'll dig up in my archives how to manually remove the CASO from the registry and post later. I worked this out years ago and it saved me on many occasions.

Thanks!

[VJware]

Yes, you are right. Replication is on uni-directional. Only "Distributed" mode of Catalogs keeps a little bit more on the MMS server.

If the MMS loses communication with the CASO, then you can convert it to a stand-alone media server following this KB article -

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.HOWTO99102

Ideally, no need to modify any registry settings (at least not in the newer versions of BE).

[Ed_Newman]

Thanks both for your responses, so if the logs aren't kept on the MMS server is there anyway of achiving what I need?  the major problem is that if we needed to restore some our servers in an emergency and the CASO wasn't avilable I would have to catalogue nearly 50 tapes to be able to restore servers, this would take for ever, so I really need a way to be able to quickly restore servers that were backed up on the CASO, but on the MSS server.

Cheers,

Ed.

[VJware]

You can look into the Optimized Duplication option as well. This involves using CASO-MMS and DeDupe.

Another alternative would be a non CASO setup. The DR site will be a regular media server. Backup the BEDB and Catalogs from the main server and restore them to the stsndby server when DR is needed. This will save time on cataloging but works well when this standby server does not run any backups itself.