Disaster Recovery for Linux 2.0 en

From SEPsesam

SEP sesam Linux BSR Restore

Introduction

This documentation explains the procedure for a Client Disaster Recovery with SEP sesam Linux BSR.

This manual shows the restore of a SUSE Linux Enterprise System (32 bit).

The restore of a Linux client-system is done with the SEP sesam Linux BSR Live-CD, which includes a sesam Client. After booting the Live-CD, the client must be added to the SEP sesam sever and the restore of a lost System is done through a regular restore on the SEP sesam Server.

Supported Distributions and File systems

Distributions

SLES 10
SLES 11
RHEL 5
Debian

Filesystems

reiserfs
ext2
ext3
xfs

System requirements

SEP sesam Server Version 3.6.4.6
SEP sesam Client Version 3.6.4.6
SEP sesam BSR CD Image for the used architecture, based on SLES 11. (SLES 11, Download)
Identical System for the Restore.

Achtung

The Hard disk of the target system must have equal or greater size than the original systems hard disc.

SAN Devices

Achtung

If the Backed up system was attached to a SAN Infrastructure, the layout of the san devices is also saved during the backup. This means, during restore the SEP sesam client may also repartition and reformat SAN devices which are visible from the booted live system.

Setup of the Linux BSR Backup

After the setup of the SEP sesam client on a system which should be backed up using BSR the following steps have to be performed:

Create a "disk_info" Backup-Source.

This backup source saves the system partition layout and existing file systems (will also include LVM and SoftRaid information):

Create a backup Taks which has an "all" backup source, in order to backup the real

data from the system:

How to do a restore of a linux client system

Boot from SEP sesam BSR Live CD

Bootmenu

After booting from the Live-CDROM a boot menu will be shown. Choose SEP sesam Live client nox in order to boot the SLES11 Live System:

Network configuration

During the Boot the SLES11 YAST Menu will pop up. There the detected Network Devices can be configured on the new system. After the network configuration, the SEP sesam client will be installed automatically into the live-cd's Ramdisk.

This may take some time!

In this example, the Live-CD Client will be configured as "recover.sep.de", using DHCP:

Info

It is also possible to use a static IP-address instead of DHCP.

End of live-cd boot

After successful configuration and boot, a regular linux shell appears:

During this step, it is also possible to do further configurations on the live-cd system and also do some diagnosis in order to ensure the system is setup properly. Tools like "ping" and "nslookup" or "host" are available on this live-cd image.

In order to start a root shell, use "su" to switch to the root user:

Info

Root PW: recover

Check if the SEP sesam client is running correctly:

/etc/init.d/sesam status

Access live-cd by ssh

It is also possible to access the booted live-cd image remote by using SSH. The Password for the Root user is "recover".

Adding the client system to the SEP sesam Server

In order to perform a restore onto the System which has been booted from the live-cd, you have to add the system to the SEP sesam Server.

The Connection between SEP sesam Client and Server has to be successful, if there are errors during adding the client, please ensure to check the regular configuration parameters (network, dns, ping, reverse dns lookup etc).

Performing the restore through SEP sesam

The Restore is split into the following parts:

Restore of "disk_info" save-set which partitions the hard-disk.
Restore of the "all" save-set and installation of the bootloader.

Restore of disk_info partition layout

Achtung

In this example the restore always goes to the system "recover" (the live cd-system) not the original one.

Restore

Check if the restore of disk_info was sucessful

After a successful restore you may want to check if the restore was successful. The Restore will create the partition layout of the original system and format its partitions.

After formatting the partitions it continues to mount them to /mnt/disk/ on the live-cd Image.

You can check if this procedure was successful by looking at the restore protocol, searching for the following part:

In this example, our original system had one partition using an ext3 file system, which was created, formatted and mountet to /mnt/disk:

Current mount status:
============================================================
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/disk type ext3 (rw)
============================================================

Restore of the "all" save-set

If the repartitioning of the disk_info restore was successful, the real data of the system (from the configured "all" Backup Task" has to be restored. It is essential that the Restore Target is set to "/mnt/disk/" otherwise the Restore will write all data to the Ramdisk of the Live-CD: