Tony, It is hard to get two people to agree on a precise definition for "bare metal restore" - I think I can generalize and say that it is a restore process that involves restoring backup data to a piece of undeveloped disk real estate, e.g., a disk that isn't formatted or is formatted with a different operating system, different flavor of an operating system ... etc. Some time ago it was the procedure that allowed you to boot from a floppy disk and execute the entire restore of the machine without using any install media. The TSM b-a client does not have a mechanism to restore a Windows 2000/XP machine in this manner. So, "we don't support bare metal restore" really should read "we don't have a native bare metal restore for Windows 2000/XP".
What TSM does offer is a restore solution that can be used in the context of a disaster recovery, i.e., starting from an OS installation from media + installation of the TSM b-a client, you can restore your Windows 2000/XP systems to a state from a previous backup by restoring the data and the "system state" (MS term)/"system objects" (TSM term). This procedure is documented in the Redbook "Deploying the Tivoli Storage Manager Client in a Windows 2000 Environment (SG24-6141-00)". We do support this function and this procedure, i.e., take service calls and accept APARs for this function. Users have been successfully deploying this solution in their environments. Another area of confusion is "restore to different hardware" - which can mean anything from swapping identical disks out, upgrading to larger disks, to changing controllers. These procedures require the backup product to preserve some of the current hardware settings in the registry after the restore, i.e., merge the information in the active registry with the information in the registry that comes back during the restore. The TSM b-a client is designed to Microsoft's rules governing this registry merge (see APAR IC34015 which discusses granting the proper Administrator permissions for this to function correctly). Having said that, I must warn that even Microsoft doesn't give any guarantees when restoring to different hardware configurations. You may hear "we don't support that!" in the context of restoring to different hardware configurations for this reason. Customers have also had success doing this and our support organization generally tries to help out as much as they can with these situations. Hope this helps, Jim Smith TSM b-a client development Hello, Tim makes a very good point in the last sentence of the 1st paragraph. "It's tough talking to TSM support when doing Bare Metal Restores - I get the line - We don't support that!"... Now I know I have seen some TSM tech support people respond on this listserv; Could someone please define, once and for all, what TSM means by Bare Metal restore? I mean..if they "do" support the backup and restoring of the "guts of Win2K in AD" (i.e. System State/Objects) Why do they say "We don't support that!"? I have spoken with TSM tech support over phone and they say that they can backup and restore the AD...However, the one answer I got over the phone was that they(TSM), will not say we support BMR is because they do not want to get caught up in supporting M.S.'s OS. So please can some one define Bare Metal Restore? Thanks -----Original Message----- From: Rushforth, Tim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 9:21 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: "Please HELP !!" TSM and Windows 2000 Active Directory. I've just done some bare metal restore tests with 5.11 client on w2k dc in a test environment. 2 DC's in AD domain, native mode, integrated DNS, both servers Global Catalog servers. All fsmo's on dc1, I restored dc2. The restore worked fine except for TSM. Failed to start one of the services after the restore - said a file was missing. (TSM was installed via Group Policy). Had to play around a bit to uninstall TSM then reinstall then things seemed to work fine. I've run into something similar with a 4.1 client and DC restores. It's tough talking to TSM support when doing Bare Metal Restores - I get the line - We don't support that! I've done multiple member server restore tests with 5.11 and never ran into this problem but ran into it 2 times on dc restores. I also tried a retrieve combined with MS system state restore. This seemed to work better (here no problems with tsm but there were a couple weird ad messages). But the resulting system seemed to be fine. All of my restores were to exact same h/w. You just have to be sure to be backing up the system state (DOMAIN ALL-LOCAL will do it). For a DC I would recommend running MS Backup of System State as insurance. Tim Rushforth City of Winnipeg -----Original Message----- From: Consiglio, Tony [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: June 20, 2002 7:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: "Please HELP !!" TSM and Windows 2000 Active Directory. I too have been posting this question to this list for about a month and a half....From what I am reading, Some users are saying that they can backup the System object either manually, or through the DSM.OPT file. I have several questions: 1.) Has any one ever done a " Successful" disaster recovery with TSM 4.2x (or higher) on a W2K DC in AD? 2.) Which version? 3.) Was it to Same server or Different server? 4.) What should we be aware or watch out for? 5.) Since we do not administer the TSM backup servers we would have to do this through the DSM.OPT file, how could this be accomplished? Any response would be greatly appreciated. -----Original Message----- From: Brian L. Nick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 12:20 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: TSM and Windows 2000 Active Directory. Good afternoon, Can anyone tell me if they have been able to accomplish the following using TSM 4.2 client running on Windows 2000? We are looking at recovering a Windows 2000 server using TSM's backup data to a physically different Windows 2000 server. The hardware is different as well. We are running TSM 4.1 on OS/390 2.10. If someone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. If you could let me know what steps were taken and if other software needed to be used that would be helpful as well. Thanks, Brian Brian L. Nick Systems Technician - Storage Solutions The Phoenix Companies Inc. 100 Bright Meadow Blvd Enfield CT. 06082-1900 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PHONE: (860)403-2281
