AIX BMR without sysback/makesysb

[pong3d]

Today one of our test AIX servers failed and may require a BMR. I have been searching this forum for information and am seeing a lot of recommendations for using makesysb or sysback as part of the backup process, but unfortunately I was not using it as part of the backup process before failure.

From what I am reading in order to restore without those utilities we would need to recreate the logical volume groups, logical volumes, and filesystems manually as they were when laying down the OS. Fortunately I have documentation with details of how this was setup orginally. Is this correct?

So if I am able to recreate the LVGs, LVs, and filesystems identically is a restore as simple as installing the client and running a restore command from / with all subdirectories? I have a document about BMR for Windows 2003 and it has many exceptions and things to watch out for, but I could not find such a document for AIX.

 

[moon-buddy]

I have just posted about this recently.

My suggestion is to use MKSYS B for AIX restores. This is a sure way to recover your system the way it is.

 

[Jeroen]

mksysb's in combination with an AIX NIM server will get the rootvg back.

If you also want a mechanism to have the other volumegroup/logical volume definitions back you could make empty savevg's of the other volume groups
By making an /etc/exclude.<othervg> and adding something like "./*" you will exclude all data from that VG (check the exclude syntax, since I don't remember from the top of my head). A savevg on the rootvg will now result in a small file that can be used to rebuild a VG in minimal time.