Inter-site Bare Metal Restore

[Chronos]

Hello all,

I would like to think that I've sifted through the pages of this rich forum enough to say that I haven't found what I've been looking for, but feel free to punch me in the face with a link that I might've missed :)

Problem: customer wants a Bare Metal Restore of one server from the main site, to a server from the disaster recovery site. Both are Windows 2003, 32 bit, identical hardware, same level of patching (they're stand-alone, not VMs). The NetBackup master/boot server is running 6.5.3.1.

What we've done so far: opened up the ports between the main/DR site (regular NBU ports +

bootp/dhcp : 67,68
tftp: 69
vnetd: 13724
Windows File Sharing: 445

We're planning to verify the connectivity next week to see if it works, and there will be a full backup of both machines prior to the actual execution of the BMR.

Any ideas/suggestions/advices/best practice procedures that Symantec employees or the NBU gurus can bring to the table are welcome. If anyone of you has done this before and encoutered problems, I'd be very grateful to see what type of problems you've had and what solution you came up with.

e.g. I hear that PXE boot is a mess in inter-site BMR, so media booting is recommendable.

Thanks!

Dan

[mandar_khanolka · Accepted solution]

In general comment is, this BMR restore plan can work.

>> What we've done so far: opened up the ports between the main/DR site
Your plan looks good here.

>> I hear that PXE boot is a mess in inter-site BMR, so media booting is recommendable.
This is all because of PXE protocol limitations.
In case you are going with NW/PXE boot BMR then make a note of below points.
1. In your subnet make sure only one PXE server is running and that is BMR pxe server running on the boot server. Otherwise in case if client PXE boot request goes to some other PXE then that boot would fail.
2. To happen cross site PXE work, you need to configure routing of PXE at the gateway/router.

As you are using same HW, it will not add any dissimilar system configuration/dissimilar windows driver configuration issues. Restore would be pretty easy having destination MAC and IP-addr edited in the original config.


I would recommend you to go through below videos explaining Windows 2k8 restore to different machine than original. In your case you can ignore driver configuration as machines are similar. This video explains many features of BMR. It shows physical to virtual machine instance restore.
BTW this video uses PXE boot restore method. You can have media based restore if intended. Other processes are same.

Link 1:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/netbackup-bmr-701-release-windows-2008-client-physical-machine-virtual-machine-restore-part1

Link 2:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/netbackup-bmr-701-release-windows-2008-client-physical-machine-virtual-machine-restore-part2


Hope this helps.


Thanks.

Mandar