BMR SRT setup

[hkyeakley]

I'm playing around with getting Bare Metal Restore setup in my environment. I've:

* Read the guide (most of it)
* setup BMR per the guide
* Setup a windows boot server
* configured a single shared resource tree
* setup a vanilla windows client
* performed a BMR backup of the system
* blown my test system away and BMR restored it

I was actually amazed at how simple the whole thing was. Now that I have my system back up, I have some questions about BMR.

#1) On my test windows server, when it came back up, it wanted me to put in the Windows 2008 license key. I didn't see anything in the BMR guide about putting license keys in the SRT. Did I miss a step or is this by design? Do I need to develop a process to have my  license keys on standby in case we had an actual disaster and I had to BMR an entire datacenter? (Aside from the license key, everything looks fine.)

#2) How granular do you folks get with Shared Resource Trees? Right now I just have one 64-bit SRT, and I'm going to make a 32-bit one as well. Is that how most of you do it? Or do I need to get more specific, like:

SRT #1) 64-bit development systems
SRT #2) 32-bit development systems
SRT #3) 64-bit production systems
SRT #4) 32-bit production systems
SRT #5) 64-bit test systems
SRT #6) 32-bit test systems

You get the idea. How does everyone else do it? Do you have 2-3 generic SRTs, or do you get extremely specific based on your environment?

As always, thanks again.

- HKY

[rishi_raj_gupta · Accepted solution]

Great to know that you were able to test BMR with simple steps by following the admin guide.

Regarding your two queries:

#1) Post BMR restore, the system should not ask to enter the OS License key until the original system that you backed-up was originally not registered with the key, which I believe might have been the case with your test server. Having said that, on production systems there is no need to maintain the standby of the license keys during actual disaster recovery.

#2) Two Windows SRTs (One 64bit and one 32bit) should be sufficient for your production/development/test Windows systems, until unless you need to specifically add some driver package on some SRT to restore any particular server.

Thanks,

Rishi Raj