From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]On Behalf Of
Dearman, Richard
> Has anyone tried to script a BMR solution for NT or AIX using
> tsm.  Everyone
> keeps saying the Bare Metal Restore is just a bunch of scripts that access
> TSM but has anyone tried create those scripts themselves.

BMR procedures for AIX are a no-brainer. Boot from installation media,
restore your bootable mksysb backup image to get rootvg back, recreate the
volume groups and filesystems, install the TSM client if it wasn't installed
in rootvg, and restore all non-rootvg files. Easy, peezy.

The problem with scripting a BMR procedure for Windows is that Windows
simply lacks the required abilities. True BMR has the following
requirements:

1. The OS must support booting from a network-attached image. NT cannot do
this, and although I've been told Win2K will do it, I've never met anyone
who has been able to make it work.
2. The OS must support the ability to insert missing drivers from local (or
remote) installation media; this ability is vital for restoration to
dissimilar hardware. (For instance, if the installation image lacks a driver
for the NIC or SCSI adapter in the target box, it must be able to fetch that
driver from installation media.) Windows completely lacks this ability
during OS installation, except for SCSI-based RAID controllers.
3. The OS must support the ability to either overwrite hot (i.e., open)
files, or support the ability to copy cold restored files to a hot location
during a reboot. Windows can't do that.

The application Bare Metal Restore (now published by Veritas, formerly
published by The Kernel Group) found a handful of workarounds in order to
get BMR to work with Windows. What I discovered in my work with BMR is that
restores were absolutely breath-taking--as long as that restore is done in
carefully controlled environments to exactly the same hardware. In the real
world, on the two occasions that I witnessed, BMR failed to delivery despite
the presence of a TKG engineer flown in to assist. We just couldn't get it
to work.

--
Mark Stapleton (stapleton AT berbee DOT com)
Certified TSM consultant
Certified AIX system engineer
MCSE