Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Hello everyone, I have a migration comming up soon and was looking to use the savevg and restvg.
What I am asking for is feedback or any gotcha's. I read about it and it looks very good meaning
about saving the vg data and everything about and the restore. So any feedback would be nice.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Use mksysb for rootvg backup. For datavg you can use the savevg/restvg. But if you already have a Daily backup in place like Legato/TSM and other apps then you don't necessarily need to save datavg. If you want to be so sure then backup the data after the apps is down before migration - but again you might have limited downtime windown so will not be feasible.

best practice is have everything in place a day before you do actual migration. Since rootvg doesn't change much. mksysb restore will be sufficient for rootvg install on new server. also finish zoning of the new server and SAN lun before migration. Then when migration window starts, after unpresenting luns to the old server shutdown the old server swing the luns new server, import the vgs and assign ips of old server to new and you are done.

Najam Kazi
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Originally posted by: Montecarlo

Run mkvgdata on all non-root volume groups. Then if you have to, you can use restvg -r to recreate the vgs on the same or different disks. savevg and restvg are fine for small volume groups that you backup to a local tape drive, but nobody has local tape drives anymore (I haven't seen one for years).

Enterprise backup solutions - TSM, Legato etc. All have a fundamental problem as far as aix volume groups are concerned. They can back up data in a very sophisticated way, but as far as I know, they do not back up data container information - no information regarding the size of the vg, number of disks, number and size of lvs, filesystem sizes, mount points or jfs logs is backed up.
mmexportfs -P does similar things for gpfs.

We run a mksysb wrapper that collects vgdata for all vgs so we can recreate vg, lv and fs if required.

The more options you have for recovery the less you are likely to need them.

Regards, Simon
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Originally posted by: tony.evans

mkvgdata is very useful, I agree. We use it on all our boxes which we back up with TSM. We also run mksysb's to disk for use with NIM and back those images up to TSM as well.

However, I disagree with your 'nobody has local tape drives anymore', maybe you're being tongue in cheek, but it's not a dead technology and for some small organisations it's still a perfectly valid method for backing up servers and storing data offsite. Even for some medium size organisations there are valid reasons for using localll attached tape.

Yes, the technology has a bunch of limitations, but that doesn't prevent it being a useful option.
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Originally posted by: Montecarlo

(This got flagged 'Disallowed content detected' - how can you tell what it is?)
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Originally posted by: jeffschaller

I wonder if it triggered on the word "e/s/c/o/r/t/ed"?
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Originally posted by: dukessd

I would think it is either tongue or e/s/c/o/r/t/e/d unless this post is successful...
OK added the /s

Ok is it tongue then... or if this succeeds then it was e/s/c/o/r/t/e/d...
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