As long as management knows the risks and has signed off on a formal document,
no worries!
Les
Martin, Terry R. (CMS/CTR) (CTR) wrote:
Thanks Alan. I would love to be able to shut the guests down while I am
backing them up but unfortunately this guest was converted over from the
Solaris side where they never brought the servers down to do backups.
These guests are suppose to be 24 by 7 up time so whenever you ask to
bring them down for any reason it's like pulling teeth!
But I get what you are saying!
Thank You,
Terry Martin
Lockheed Martin - Citic
z/OS and z/VM Performance Tuning and Operating Systems Support
Office - 443 348-2102
Cell - 443 632-4191
-----Original Message-----
From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:ib...@listserv.uark.edu] On
Behalf Of Alan Altmark
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:08 PM
To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
Subject: Re: DR Backup using DFDSS
On Thursday, 08/12/2010 at 11:36 EDT, "Martin, Terry R. (CMS/CTR) (CTR)"
<terry.mar...@cms.hhs.gov> wrote:
Yes, I knew that the backup would be a ?fuzzy? one but I have not had
an
issue
with restoring since I am doing a physical cylinder by cylinder
backup.
We do
use FDRUPSTREAM to handle the incremental and full backups of all the
DASD for
each guest, but the DFDSS is a little different.
Not had an issue *yet*, I think you meant to say. It may simply be
fuzzy,
or it may be positively hirsute. Out-of-band backups of dasd,
particularly multiple volumes, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Multiple
volumes compound the risk (think: LVM).
Bring the server down, snapshot/flashcopy/whatever all of its volumes,
restart the server, then backup the copies. This minimizes down time
and
ensures a *consistent* backup set. (The real requirement is that the
volumes be unmounted, but it's just easier to bring down the server,
IMO.)
Linux's support for suspend/resume may be able to help with this as
well
and reduce the length of the outage even more.
But since you're using FDRUpstream for incremental AND full backups, it
seems that you only need a functioning Linux with FDRUpstream available,
not a fully restored Linux image. That is, enough to kick off the
restore
from the FDR backups. No point in backing up, storing, and restoring
data
you're going to throw away anyway.
IMO, of course. As a security person, it's my job to be paranoid. I
don't worry about the 95% of the time that it works ok, I worry about
the
5% of the time that it doesn't.
Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott
