I admit I am biased. I work for The Kernel Group (TKG) and I am proud of our
Bare Metal Restore (BMR) product and of the capabilities that BMR has provided
to TSM.
TKG's BMR generates restoration procedures during the "Prepare to Restore"
operation. These procedures are customized for the particular machine being
restored and are executed by BMR to drive the unattended recovery of this
machine. In other words, not only does BMR generate system recovery procedures,
it does so automatically at any time you choose to perform the BMR "Prepare to
Restore" function (before or after machine failure). All configuration changes
made to the machine are captured automatically (at TSM backup time) or manually
(any time you choose) and are automatically incorporated into the custom
restoration procedure at the time Prepare to Restore is run. So the restoration
procedure is based on the machine configuration that existed when the TSM backup
was done. The configuration present at the time of the last incremental
describes exactly how you want to rebuild the machine before you restore this
data, right?
The Kernel Group's Bare Metal Restore for Solaris has several advantages over
doing it by hand after booting from a jumpstart image:
1. You don't have to remember how the drive was formatted before, BMR will
automate the format to the way it was at the last incremental backup.
2. You don't have to worry about making an error in the procedure. Human
error is eliminated by the automated procedure generated and executed by
BMR.
3. If you have a Volume Manager, BMR handles that as well. For example it can
automatically re-partition, re-mirror and re-encapsulate a
Veritas-encapsulated mirrored root drive, and then use TSM to restore the
data. Automatically, unattended, in one fell swoop.
4. You can restore just the drives containing the operating system, or all the
drives.
5. You can use the dissimilar disk restore feature to re-map filesystems to
other drives, decrease or increase the file system size, or eliminate some
filesystems if desired.
6. Because BMR's restoration process is automated, there is no manual
intervention other than the initial network boot, so a large number of
machines can be recovered by a small number of administrators and/or
operators.
7. While BMR does support network boot, it also gives the option to create
bootable CDs (this feature is referred to as Media Boot) in the event that
network boot is not suitable for a given environment. Media Boot
eliminates the requirement for NFS, bootp, bootparams, and tftp for UNIX,
and DOS network drivers for NT.
8. BMR supports restoration from a TSM backupset. It is possible to do a
complete LAN free restore of an NT server using both the TSM backupset and
the BMR Media Boot options.
9. Because you can use the same tool for four major OS platforms (Solaris,
HP-UX, AIX, NT), Bare Metal Restore eliminates the need to manage multiple
backup and restore methods. Think about how much time you spend
administering mksysb, jumpstart, sysback, Ghost images or mkrecovery. With
BMR there's no need to perform redundant system backups or maintain client
configuration definitions. So long as the normal TSM backups are taken, any
BMR client can be completely recovered without additional effort. This
alone represents a substantial savings in administrator time.
We keep piling on functionality to BMR as we expand the breadth to other OS's.
Your feedback is valuable to us.
Keith Kwiatek wrote:
> Yes, and it seems rather expensive.... we have 750+ nodes and they are
> talking $200-300K for an enterprise license.... or somewhere between $400
> and $900 per node for an individual license....
>
> Our solaris clients were fine until we went to TSM 4.x.... now we can't use
> the tried and true method of "boot off cd, and run dsmc to completely
> restore".....With TSM4.x it seems solaris jumpstart doesn't provide
> libraries that TSM4.x needs to even provide a command line prompt....
>
> Kernel Group gets around this with bootp+NFS, --as far as I can tell, all
> they really add is some scripts to automate the process of formatting and
> partitioning the drives (is this a good thing?)..... I think we could do the
> same if we can give our customers access to bootp and NFS (which is FREE),
> then they would just have to format+partitition, and run dsmc restore....
>
> At least, that is the theory.... we might go with with Kernel Group's BMR
> yet....
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Keith
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Stapleton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2000 10:01 PM
> Subject: Re: Where are the solaris bare metal restore procedures for TSM 4.x
> ?????!!!!!!
>
> > Kevin M Wisneski wrote:
> > > When you get them (if you get them) can you foward them to me....I am in
> the
> > > same boat as far as creating Solaris BMR procedures!!! Thanks
> >
> > Have any of you looked at The Kernel Group's Bare Metal Restore?
> >
> > --
> > Mark Stapleton ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
> >
begin:vcard
n:Schafer;Ray
tel;cell:+1 (512) 426-3188
tel;fax:+1 (512) 433-3200
tel;work:+1 (512) 433-3345
x-mozilla-html:FALSE
url:http://www.tkg.com
org:The Kernel Group;Sales and Services
version:2.1
email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
title:Senior Sales Engineer
adr;quoted-printable:;;1250 South Capital of Texas Highway=0D=0ABldg 3, Ste. 601;Austin;TX;78746;United States
fn:Ray Schafer
end:vcard
