We have the same question as we have only recently moved to Tivoli from another product.
We like the Tivoli product tremendously and appreciate many of it's features but we were having trouble working out what the exact steps were. We believe we found some documentation that indicates the only way possible to restore a complete BMR (Bare Metal Restore) to a new server is to have that new server use the exact same server name 'at the time of backup'
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21164812
"The system name must be set to match the system name at the time of backup. Unless this is set, the system object component cannot be restored. "
This presents us with a problem I will outline here:
We were hoping to be able to do a DR test of a bare metal restore on a specific application server that is in production in our environment. That said, we were also hoping to maintain the original production server as a working entity without having to rename or remove it from our AD Domain. It appears from the doc that this is not an option. Our objective was to provide a proof of concept to the application group responsible for this server by way of bringing the restored server back up on a separate system (but exact same hardware) and allow them to test the functionality of the application and verify all is in working order exactly as the production. The application in question is an internally written app that unfortunately the owning group has lost the knowledge to recreate / reinstall manually so it is prohibitively difficult to recover in the event of disk failure without a complete restore.
At this point we are concerned that it may not be possible then with the info gleaned from the above doc to do so without serious disruption to the production server due to the obvious implications of having two systems on the domain with the same name. Imaging the system drive was also explored until we discovered that without Windows PE or similar (Bart PE, etc) we would not be able to restore the image of a system drive because of the locks in place by the OS.
Right now it appears that this leaves us with little or possibly no options regarding the proof of concept DR test that I outline here.
Can anyone provide thoughts / experiences they have regarding the possibilities we may have. I realize also there are some third party options that we have not thoroughly investigated as yet such as Cristie Bare Machine Recovery
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/cristie-bmr.html
but we wanted to completely explore our current options first.
Perhaps we are missing something obvious and we were hoping to get some assistance from our peers
Thanks for any asistance,
Joe Funk
