Someone pointed TKG's product out a few months ago to me, and I looked at their
site. If you read the FAQ carefully, you'll see that you will need one server
for every type of system you need to restore. So if want BMR capability for both
Solaris, AIX, and NT, then you'll need a Solaris, AIX, and NT server for their
product to work. Each of those servers will need to run the BMR File Server and
BMR Netboot Server.From the sound of it, I worry that if you had some servers
running Solaris 6 and some Solaris 7, that you might need a different File/Boot
server for each of those.
After taking over the TSM admin for our site, I've been looking in to BMR
options. The best I've come up with so far is the following:
I bought some big bit buckets for inside the TSM (RS6000 h50 AIX) server.
Nothing too fast, just decent. For my AIX servers, I'm running makesysb and
dumping the data onto a NFS share. For Solaris and Linux, I'm using the
hostdump.sh script from backupcentral.com (run by the Orielly backup book
author) to dump to the NFS share. I manually dump the OS only after the change
log is modified (we keep a change log on the boot system so that any admin that
makes a change logs it in case there are problems). This way it's fairly
automated. I also run it manually before/after patching or upgrading. I also run
SysAudit and Sysinfo every night and dump those locally and to the same NFS
share, so I have up to date info on the system in case I loose the disk
configurations.
To restore, I use the install CD to boot, get the networking up and running,
mount the NFS share, and restore.
I'm still rolling this out, but so far it's worked well. I restored a solaris 7
server as a test, and it was flawless.
Advantages:
no need for tape drives on every machine
system backups are always available on disk
system backups are also backed up from the TSM server disks in case that
server crashs
No need to reinstall OS/patches/TSM client to restore data
very helpful if you are trying to standarize your OS configs
can be used as an 'image' to upgrade/standardize multiple systems
Disadvantages
using NFS, but wrapped it so it's only available from server subnet
lots of duplicated system data (working on this)
more manual steps, but once documented, not hard
Steve Cochran
Dartmouth College
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