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Relax-and-Recover: Easy backup and restore of Linux OS on IBM Power Systems

By IBM Systems Lab Services posted Thu October 29, 2020 11:11 AM

  

By Wasif Mohammad, Technical Solution Architect, IBM Systems Lab Services


Today’s business requires 24x7 uptime for critical applications. For most organizations, unexpected downtime translates directly into loss of revenue, loss of business or loss of reputation. Operating system (OS) backup plays a very important role in bringing your systems back to the original state in the event of an OS crash or disaster. “
Backup and recovery” describes the process of creating and storing copies of data that can be used to protect organizations against data loss. This is sometimes referred to as “operational recovery.” Recovery from a backup typically involves restoring the data to the original location or to an alternate location where it can be used in place of the lost or damaged data.

Relax-and-Recover

Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is a full-featured OS backup tool available with SUSE Linux and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating systems written in Bash. It has many configurable and customizable options available with numerous ready-to-use workflows for common situations.

For organizations running Enterprise Linux on IBM Power® Systems, ReaR comes as a utility tool along with Linux distribution. You don’t have to look for other third-party software or tools for image-based backup of Linux distribution. ReaR can be a bare-metal recovery solution, where it can help to restore the Linux OS easily and quickly in the event of an OS crash or disaster. 

Key features
Here are some of the key features of Relax-and-Recover:

  • It has a modular design written in Bash and can be extended using custom functionality.
  • It supports various boot media including ISO, PXE, OBDR tape, USB or eSATA storage.
  • It supports a variety of network protocols including FTP, SFTP, HTTP, NFS and CIFS for storage and backup.
  • It supports disk layout implementation such as LVM, DRBD, iSCSI, HWRAID, SWRAID, multipathing and LUKS (encrypted partitions and file systems).
  • It supports both third-party and internal backup tools including IBM Spectrum Protect, HP DataProtector, Symantec NetBackup, Bacula, tar and rsync.
  • It supports booting using PXE, DVD/CD, bootable tape or virtual provisioning.
  • It supports a simulation model that shows what scripts are run without executing them.
  • It supports consistent logging and advanced debugging options for troubleshooting purposes.
  • It can be integrated with monitoring tools such as Nagios and Opsview.
  • It can be integrated with job schedulers such as cron.
  • It supports IBM PowerVM virtualization technologies (KVM, PowerVM).

Use cases

When a software or hardware failure breaks the system, the system administrator faces three tasks to restore it to the fully functioning state on a new hardware environment:

  1. Booting a rescue system on the new hardware
  2. Replicating the original storage layout
  3. Restoring user and system files

Most backup software solves only the third problem. To solve the first and second problems, ReaR can be used as a disaster recovery and system migration utility.

There are several uses cases for ReaR:

  • We can boot bare metal servers and LPARs using the rescue system image and initiate a system restore from the backup. It can restore to different hardware where necessary; hence, it can also be employed as a system migration tool.
  • Relax-and-Recover is the central component of disaster recovery preparations for your data center. It can be used as a disaster recovery tool for an OS where the OS can be restored on the same hardware or LPAR in the event of an OS crash, or on different hardware where necessary.
  • You can also restore files from ReaR backup if someone deletes files in OS directories.
ReaR Backup and Recover


Need help planning and designing your IBM Power Systems environment?

If you plan to have Linux OS backup and successful restore, talk to IBM Systems Lab Services. We can provide services to help configure, set up and demonstrate Linux backup and restore. If you want to engage IBM Systems Lab Services, contact your IBM client rep or reach out to us directly.

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Fri October 30, 2020 12:38 AM

Congratulations Wasif for putting up the the blog for Linux backup. Informative indeed.