disaster rcovery
How to take complete backup of red hat systems and restore it as required without an outage.
Responses
Do you want to do the backup or the restore without an outage? I think a restore without an outage is going to be a challenge....
To be honest I would be using a third party backup agent, and if possible backing at the VM level (if it is a VM). It also depends on a large number of variables such as what type of storage the server is using, what type of applications it is hosting (do they need to be stopped for backup / snap?), how much data needs to be backed up etc.
Can you provide any more details about your configuration?
Hi Rahul,
Your initial description was kinda light. Performing disaster recovery procedures on a system can offer complexity, and some more specifics would improve your likelyhood in receiving an answer that will work well for your scenario...
PixelDrift's requeset for more details would be very useful for anyone here helping you. Will your need for backup/restore be on a physical system? (I would suspect so). Are you running RHEL 5/6? Does it use SAN or NAS? How much storage is on the system and in what configuration? Does it have an internal or external raid (or both)? Would you restore it to a different system? If so, are the systems the same architecture? Do you have a unique network setup? Is the system running oracle or some database that would add additional factors to the backup or storage? Is the system running third party software? If you are restricted on the amount of downtime, how long of a "window of time" do you have? These are only some questions, but adding specifics would help folks here help you.
I do not know your specifics, but I once used /usr/sbin/dump /usr/sbin/restore to backup and restore a system once to fulfill a customer request, yet it took a bit of work and the system was not available during that time to the customer. I had to work with this for a bit to make it work as the customer wanted.
There's also LVM snapshots, that might be an option. That documentation at that link mentions "without causing a service interruption". Your mileage may vary, and your (unknown to us) configurations/applications may contribute to more complexity in the procedure.
More details would really help, please consider more details such as what PixelDrift's asks and whatever else would be relevant.
Kind Regards...
Rahul, just curious, do you have vmware that you could take the system and go "P to V" (Physical to Virtual)? This may or may not be a good thing depending on the system, and a variety of factors. If it were virtual, like PixelDrift mentioned, using a "snapshot" or "clone" would be highly useful. If you had two like systems sharing a raw lun, then snapshots/clones -will-not-work. We do not know your setup and details so we can't really go far with this at the moment,
Kind Regards...
There have been discussions on this style of backup here:
https://access.redhat.com/site/discussions/668593
https://access.redhat.com/site/discussions/669273
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