Questions regarding SR

[Streetprint]

Hi.

I am looking at purchasing SR 8.5. On our BE system we currently run 11D which I will be upgrading at the same time. So I am wondering about the following:

1. If I purchase the SR 8.5 core component, does that supercede the BE core licensing?
2. What is the SR license manager - I mean it looks obvious but just in case I'd like it clarified...
3. In an example, if I were to add a new server which was not of a critical nature and didn't require an SR agent on it, would I still be forced to purchase an SR license for this particular server?
4. What are storage requirements for SR images or at least what are the best practises for any required media?

Overall, I want to make sure I have enough disk space to do snapshots if they are required. In general, I can live with restoring data from tape but getting the servers, in particular AD servers, up and running quickly is my penultimate objective.

Thanks for any and all answers.

--james

[Gilly-Bhoy]

1. As far as I know they are licensed as seperate products
2. Have no idea
3. No?! Why would you? Buy 5 licenses (for example) and install the product on your top 5 critical servers
4. Depends. How big are your system drives in terms of in-use space? I wouldn't personally recommend using the compression built into the product as it has caused me trouble in the past., But hey that's me. In fairness the system drives shouldn't grow too much over time. What do you mean in terms of "best practices for required media"?

Good Luck,
Gilly

[Streetprint]

Thanks for clarifying those questions Gary.

Let me speak to question 4: The system drives are not bigger than 40GB. By best practises I meant to ask are people using USB drives more or attached storage?

Thanks again.

--james

[Gilly-Bhoy]

Whatever is available really! If you have attached storage then use it as it is going to be quicker writing to this. But all your eggs are in one basket as your images are located "next to" the server!
However with USB drives you can detach them and keep them somewhere safe!

Best practice with both of these resources available to you would be to run your images to the attached storage and then use the "offsite copy" option within BESR to send copy's of the images to the USB drives so your fully protected!

Hope this helps?

Gilly

[marcogsp]

I use a similar strategy to that which Gilly outlined.  The BESR images are written to a SAN and then copied to external drives which are transported offsite.  The offsite copy option was not available when I first stated using this product, so I use scripts to copy the data to external drives.  In any event, Gilly's advice is very sound.  Never rely on one storage device to contain your backups. 

The only thing I can add is to do test recoveries of your images in a lab environment as double surety of their integrity.  They can also warn you of impending trouble of your production servers.  A test restore of one of my domain controllers showed that a problem with the MBR was developing on the production server.  An easy fix since I caught it early