diaster recovery tape backup from a phsyical host to a virtual guest

[dwchan]

Has anyone try to diaster recovery a tape image (using backup exec) from a physical host backup to a virtual guest? We try to do this at work but keep running into some tape error problem

dwc

[kix1979]

What are you trying to restore? There should be no issue restoring data or an application back into a VM via a backup agent. You probably will not get a bare metal restore to work, unless you inject the VMware drivers.

[dwchan]

We use tape backup with Backup Exec 9.1 on our physical server. I have a dedicate scsi controller and tape drive allocated to a VM guest inside esx 3.0.1. The dr server is up and running without issue (before the actual restore). When the DR agent kick off, it able to find the tape drive, spin up the tape, and read from the tape. But shortly after (few seconds) it error with a tape inconsistency! I am just checking and see if this can be done, I know that it is not your general dr procedure

dwc

[WesTopping]

I have done it a number of times durring Disaster recovery exercises. I just brought up a base Image VM with Veritas client software and did a restore like normal. After the restore was done I used Ultimate P2V to inject the VMware SCSI drivers.

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174

Wes

[dwchan]

Got couple dumb question

1. For the restore, are you using the IDR agent or jus the regular Backup Exec Agent)

2. The drivers a the site you mention, are they good for ESX 3.0 also, or only for ESX 2.5.#?

dwc

[dwchan]

I am a bit confuse. Here is what we have done so far, and it doesn't seem to work at all. We use backup exec 9.1 to backup our physical server to tape. What we done next is to build a generic Windows 2003 server VM inside ESX 3.0.1. On our ESX 3.0.1 server, we have an extra scsi controller that is connected to a dedicate external LTO drive. For our VM guest, we added the tape scsi device to its. Afterward, we launch the IDR agent (which we create using the the backup exec software).

For the sake of testing, we install backup exec 9.1 on our virtual guest, copy some files over, and ran a full backup. We then deleted the vm guest. Afterward, we re-install a generic windows 2003 guest, kick of the IDR agent, and did a Disaster recovery restore from tape back to the VM guest without issue. We did this to confirm that we can read and write to the LTO drive without issue, and that the IDR agent works in the VM environment

However, when we try to do this using a tape that was previous backing up a physical server, we are running into some serious issue. As mention before, we ran build the a generic windows 2003 guest (at this point, we didn't install vmtools on its yet), kick of the diaster recovery agent, it mount the tape drive, and read from the tape. it recognize our backup and the restore seem to went fine (Drive c, d, and system state, etc). But right after the reboot, it will blue screen with the following error code

A Problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer....

STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78A6A98, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I would only presume this is related to a bad scsi controller problem. So base on the feedback i got from this forum, i went out to www.rtfm-ed.co.uk and download the Fix-VMSCSI by Qui Hong’s. Right after the restore, but before i reboot, i try to use both the lsi and vmscsi fix. No matter what I do (i even try to install the vm-tools before the reboot) it will always blue-screen. What am I doing wrong? Any ffedback would be strongly appreicated

dwc

[Mike_Fink]

Well, first thing (I realize this is test, but I still have to say it), you really should not be running the BE server in a VM. In a DR situation, you should have a physical machine to function as the BE server, and use that to read the data from tape and send it into the VMs.

With that out of the way..

You should look at LSR. That will do exactly what you want to do. It will inject the drivers for VMware (or other HW, including physical) and do a full system recovery without an OS install at all. It's the best way to do a recovery from tape of an entire system without having to install an OS first. I am not sure how LSR is licensed for BE9 customers; but it's really the right way to do what your trying to do.

[dwchan]

What is LSR?

dwc