The Bare Metal Restore product from The Kernel Group
(http://www.tkg.com/products/bmr/tsm) has the ability to use the backup
data in TSM to recover your server.  The "prepare to restore" operation
can be issued with a single command and will create a customized restore
procedure that will automatically recover the entire machine, or if you
prefer, just the rootvg.  The prepare to restore operation will also
allocate the BMR file and boot server components so they will answer the
network boot and NFS requests of the server being recovered.

It works well, and the restore is automated: prepare to restore and
network boot.  That's it.

Lisa Cabanas wrote:

Thanks for your reply, Herfried.  It brings to mind some other questions
regarding other volume groups.  Say you have all your Oracle stuff on one
or two different vgs.  Would you need to have done a savevg sometime in
the past to get the vg back, or at bare metal time would you need to
manually create the volume group and lvs and fss associated with it, and
then fill it with the data from TSM?

I went and looked for a bare metal Redbook for AIX and found the one from
1997 that deals with AIX 4.1-- is it still pretty applicable to 4.3.3?  I
wonder if TSM still "supports" a bare metal for AIX, or if it is now
unsupported like Win2K is?


thanks
lisa




Herfried Abel <ha7 AT DAIMLERCHRYSLER DOT COM>
08/09/2001 01:52 AM
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"


       To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
       cc:     (bcc: Lisa Cabanas/SC/MODOT)
       Subject:        Re: AIX 4.3.3 list of excludable files & filesystems



Lisa,

All the filesystems within the rootvg are backed up with a mksysb as long
as they are not explicit excluded from rthe mksysb. In general AIX does
not
delete (major) files on reboot as other UNIX's do ( eg /tmp ).
This is how we do the restore of an AIX machine :
1) restore mksysb
2) restore "OS-definitions" via TSM ( rootvg filesystems eg. /etc ) ( TSM
Client already restored by mksysb )
3) restore filesystems (non rootvg) via TSM
4) restore application-data ( DBs eg. ORACLE,SAPDB, MSSQL etc ) via TDP
Agents in necessary.

Step 2) depends on the time-difference between the mksysb and the last
config changes of AIX. Should not be necessary if you make a mksysb after
every config change , as all of the sysadmins do :-)

So what we do, we dont exclude files from the rootvg in the TSM backup (
AIX-OS is not really need much space ) but we exclude lots of temporary
application files. We think that at this point we can find a lot of
temporary data (eg. SAP rollfiles ).Of cause you have to know your
application / Datebase very well, so that you dont exclude a file by
mistake.

herfried





Lisa Cabanas <CABANL AT MAIL.MODOT.STATE.MO DOT US>@VM.MARIST.EDU> on 08.08.2001
18:20:26

Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>

Sent by:  "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>


To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
cc:

Subject:  AIX 4.3.3 list of excludable files & filesystems


Has anyone ever compiled a list of files and/or file systems that can be
excluded from backup either because they are dynamically created by the OS
at
reboot/syncvg etc
or because they are included in a mksysb?






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