Having had several failures of powervc-restore in an attempt to migrate from PowerVC v1.4.4.2 to v2.0.1.1, I am now looking at performing a new PowerVC v2.0.1.1 environment and recovering all of our configuration from scratch. To get this started, I envisioned simply running "powervc-uninstall -f" to uninstall, and then simply reinstall PowerVC v2.0.1.1. Nope! I am told by PowerVC IBM Support that that approach seldom (if ever) results in a good outcome! They are telling me that we need a scratch install of RHEL 8.4 to get started. Say what!!???

I provided the explanation above to bring me to the topic I wish to discuss. If the above is the approach necessary to recover from a failed powervc-restore, then it behooves me to have some way to do a point-in-time (PIT) restore of our RHEL server to a PIT when everything was working well. And AFAIK, in our environment, we have no such solution, today. Our servers are stand-alone Lenovo servers using physical hard drives, so I think that eliminates the notion of using some type of storage server base snapshot of our "good" OS. And AFAIK, there is still no RHEL utility the equivalent of a mksysb for AIX, is there? I know that we have Commvault coming to our enterprise environment, soon, and they have a 1-Touch system restore for AIX. I would assume/hope that they have the same for RHEL??

Anyway, this new understanding of just how complex and fragile PowerVC/Openstack seems to be is a real eye-opener! And we are going to need to seriously rethink our current backup/recovery practices. Got any good suggestions for us?

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Mackey Morgan
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#PowerVC