AIX

'morning,

Does anyone here use ReaR? If so, which process do you use?

I want to setup a ReaR server for build images (not backups) and have a little NFS server that the gold build LPAR can save a bootable and backup ISO to.

For building an LPAR, is the best way to copy the ISO to the VIO and load it into a vopt for the LPAR to boot from? Any other way to do it?

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

Good Morning!

We are currently in the process of introducing it for our SLES LPARs, after we already did a couple of successful restore tests.

As we use TSM / spectrum protect we use rears support for that.

Our process has two sides:

1) Daily we save important important configuration aspects of each LPAR (e.g. CPU sizing, assinged memory, size of SAN volumes mapped to them), in simple text files, which are also send to our TSM server.  That way we know how to recreate the LPARs should we are ever facing the worst case scenario and need to redo our infrastructure from scratch.

2) Weekly we create new ISO images using rear.  These images are also send to TSM immediately, and stored next to the textfiles from step 1 as well.

We do not put them into the VIOS libraries automatically, but in our case they are rather small (just boot environment and TSM related files).  And as said:  Our worst case scenario is a new (separated) environment anyway.

Restore is, as you said, simple:

• Recreate LPAR
• Copy iso image to VIOS
• Add vtopt device
• Boot from ISO

What we are currently experimenting is of we want to include restoration of all volume groups and filesystems, or just the rootvg, and then recreate everything else later.  What we figured is, that rear works perfect, when using the same SAN volumes, it works pretty well, when using new volumes of different sizes.

But our SAP Hana server are installed with lots of volumes of same size, which makes the mapping of new volumes to the the old ones quite cumbersome. It is doable, but is manual work handling long numeric IDs.  And I am not sure, if it is easily done when working under time pressure.

A feature which we haven't used yet, is the integration into the grub menu.  Rear allows you to automatically add the rescue iso to the boot menu of the grub.  So as long as your boot manager and your boot filesystem is still working, you can start a recovery from there. That approach would save you some time handling with the ISOs and vtopt devices.

We tested, that it works and boots, but we haven't done any other tests.  I imagine it might be useful to recover form a failed operating system upgrade (which didn't broke your boot manager).

We also have a "golden rescue image" so to say:  A (periodocally) rescue image from a test system, which already has the configuration to access all our TSM servers. So should we notice, that we forgot install rear to an LPAR, or the rescue image of that machine doesn't work, we have some documentaiton how to use the golden image, and change the filesystem and backup information to the system we actually want to recover.  That is a little bit more complicate, but also possible.

We found rear to be very flexible.

Best regards,

  Alexander

'morning,

Does anyone here use ReaR? If so, which process do you use?

I want to setup a ReaR server for build images (not backups) and have a little NFS server that the gold build LPAR can save a bootable and backup ISO to.

For building an LPAR, is the best way to copy the ISO to the VIO and load it into a vopt for the LPAR to boot from? Any other way to do it?

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

'morning,

Does anyone here use ReaR? If so, which process do you use?

I want to setup a ReaR server for build images (not backups) and have a little NFS server that the gold build LPAR can save a bootable and backup ISO to.

For building an LPAR, is the best way to copy the ISO to the VIO and load it into a vopt for the LPAR to boot from? Any other way to do it?

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

'morning,

Does anyone here use ReaR? If so, which process do you use?

I want to setup a ReaR server for build images (not backups) and have a little NFS server that the gold build LPAR can save a bootable and backup ISO to.

For building an LPAR, is the best way to copy the ISO to the VIO and load it into a vopt for the LPAR to boot from? Any other way to do it?

Regards,

Henrik Morsing

I finally had time to test a recovery, but just get:

                      .----------------------------------.
                      |  No Operating Systems Installed  |
                      `----------------------------------'

The backup log seems to finish ok:

2024-10-15 07:45:23.836640854 Finished running 'prep' stage in 1 seconds
2024-10-15 07:45:25.431890391 Using guessed bootloader 'PPC' (found PPC PreP boot partition 'ID=0x41' on /dev/sda)
2024-10-15 07:45:26.893910427 Including rescue/default/430_prepare_timesync.sh
2024-10-15 07:46:02.806859445 Including output/ISO/Linux-ppc64le/810_prepare_multiple_iso.sh

What am I doing wrong here?

'morning,

Does anyone here use ReaR? If so, which process do you use?

I want to setup a ReaR server for build images (not backups) and have a little NFS server that the gold build LPAR can save a bootable and backup ISO to.

For building an LPAR, is the best way to copy the ISO to the VIO and load it into a vopt for the LPAR to boot from? Any other way to do it?

Regards,

Henrik Morsing