server 2008 R2 bare metal restore

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Hello,

I have a shiny new HP ML370 G6 running 64bit 2008 R2. This unit has 8-146gb hard drives with two in a RAID 1 on the internal controller for the OS and the other six in RAID volume on an added controller for data.

This unit acts as a Domain Controller and has SQL 2008 standard installed with an Electronic Medical Record running on the SQL server. It also acts as the application server and is used for file sharing.

I know how long it took to setup this thing up and although it has a huge amount of redundancy built into the hardware, It is still a lot of stuff running on a single box. The facility really does not have the budget to spend another $15,000 to setup a second DC and SQL server for redundancy. I am looking for some way to image this setup so I could do a bare-metal restore in a couple of hours or less.

I originally wanted to run this whole thing on virtual machines within this box as this makes the whole backup and restore process much easier, however, the software vendor will not support their product run in a virtual environment.

I am currently using backup exec 12.5 for file backup and am backing up system state with it, however, I would still have to install the server OS and any other programs such as SQL 2008, etc and would be looking at a good 6-8 hours of downtime if everything went perfectly which it never does.

Does anyone here have any suggestions of a good solution for a bare metal backup that can restore in a minimal amount of time?

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Have a look at this BackupAssist Windows Server 2008 PDF. Bare Metal Restore is covered on pp 10-13

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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That looks interesting and may cover what I need.

I guess I am trying to understand how imaging software would treat my 6 drive RAID5 volume and what would happen if I tried to restore it on a 1TB single drive in a workstation in an emergency situation.

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I would think you could only do a bare-metal restore to the same/highly similar configuration you had earlier. Think of the chipset and other hardware-specific drivers, for example!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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My biggest questions is can I image a RAID array?

The array size is around 735gb so if it is seen as one drive by the imaging software I should be able to image it to a 1TB drive, I just can’t quite get my head around how a drive image program would ‘see’ this type of volume.

I very well understand the disimilar hardware issue and I really shouldn’t have asked the question that way.

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I back up user files and do an Image (VSS) backup of the C: drive all to a RAIDed NAS drive. The Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) has four RAID-5 drives (if I remember correctly), partitioned as C: and D:.

You may want to put the question to the BackupAssist v5 forum, where you are almost guaranteed to get a reply from one of their techies. Their customer service is, in teen-speak, “awesome”, or, to most people, “extremely good”…
You’ll probably have to register to post, not surprisingly.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Thanks so much for the information. I think I will fire up Server 2008 r2’s built in backup and image mine. I can then see how it works and what the image looks like.

Not sure how I would do a test restore with this but will cross that bridge later.

The way I understand the documentation on BackupAssist is that it actually uses the core of NTbackup and adds functionality so I should be able to test with what is there to see if the image works as expected.

Thanks again for your time in pointing me to those links and explaining it in a way I can understand.

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If the RAID is done in hardware you only need the files and meta data, which Backup Exec does for you. If the RAID is in software (Windows) you are asking for trouble and will spend even longer recovering your hardware.

Backup Exec will do everything you need as long as you can load Windows on the replacement box – about 1 hour – so you are still stuck with a restore time of 1 day by the time you load everything and test.

Is this box the only domain controller? If so you can safely restore it, if not you cannot restore it from image without upsetting the other DCs. DCs across two or 3 boxes is always a good idea.

To backup the roles on the server you can use a few batch files and pick up the various configs – e.g. file shares are just a registry key and a disk location. Let me know if you want more details.

cheers, Paul

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RAID is in hardware. I have Backup Exec doing system state but have no way to test a bare metal restore as I do not have like hardware to play with. I have much more experience with Linux servers (and this location was a SAMBA domain until a few months ago.) I can backup linux and be live with a new machine in 15 minutes or less.

I have imaged the server with the built in Server 2008 R2 backup. I understand that it is possible to mount that backup in a virtual machine and want to look at this angle for quick restoration of services. This is a nursing home and all their med orders are on that system. If it goes down, it is critical that I can have access in less then a day.

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If you can mount the image in a virtual machine you can use pretty much any hardware with Windows 2008. You can safely ignore the vendor’s warning about virtual hardware unless the software needs to talk to an add-in card.

cheers, Paul

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You can safely ignore the vendor’s warning about virtual hardware unless the software needs to talk to an add-in card.

cheers, Paul

The vendor’s warning is that there will be issues with speed and performance. I think they have not tested and are not willing to spend the hours to assure themselves that they can support it. I understand their issue as it brings in an exponentially greater number of possible points of failure, however, I am willing to use it this way in a temporary setup for emergency restore (If I can get the blamed thing to work).

If I find a solution that works, I will post back my procedure. I think there are quite a few small to mid size businesses that cannot afford two fully licensed servers for their domain, but would benefit from a procedure that could quickly return them to service in case of full server failure for a “reasonable” investment.

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Hi,

Just an update.

So far I have been unable to directly boot mounted Windows Server 2008 R2’s backup .vhd files in either VMware player or Virtual PC 2007 sp1. I can attach them as hard drives in the virtual machines and the full size of the volumes are recognized (even though the actual file size is much smaller). When I try to boot the virtual machine I go directly into the PXE boot screen. When I cancel PXE boot, I get the “No operating system found on boot device” error.

It seems like this could be any number of problems such as; file permissions locked, unable to run the 64bit OS in my WinXP 32bit environment, the backup does not actually do a true image but pulls some things from the rescue DVD, etc..

Has anybody else played with this and got it to work successfully?

I think my next task will be to try a test restore onto a VM. This would also fill the requirements if the image will restore to virtualized hardware as I could have VMware player preinstalled on a workstation and only do an image restore and then bring the data up to date with current backups which I think could be done in the previously stated 2hr window.

(my thought is that I will use backup exec to do daily data and system state backups and either run an image weekly, or each time I install an update which changes the OS or the installed programs)

Thanks to P T and BATcher for your thoughts on this so far….

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As the OS is 64bit you cannot run it in VMware unless you have set it up specifically – I assume you have.

If it will not boot it’s probably because you haven’t got the boot partition in your VM – 2008 R2 (aka Windows 7 server) usually has a small boot partition as the first on the disk. I am currently wrestling with one in an attempt to clone 12 servers for a roll out at work – I’ll let you know if I succeed.

cheers, Paul

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As the OS is 64bit you cannot run it in VMware unless you have set it up specifically – I assume you have.

Yep

If it will not boot it’s probably because you haven’t got the boot partition in your VM – 2008 R2 (aka Windows 7 server) usually has a small boot partition as the first on the disk.

I need to think about this. I think this could be the problem but don’t know what it would look like in VM. I wonder if I would actually restore the image on the VM using the server install disk if it would work.

I would be thinking of setting up a high end workstation with Windows 7 or xp. This machine would be someone’s production machine. I would have a couple of extra large drives in it and would push my image backups to one of these drives over the network. I would have VMware installed and could do a restore directly from the backup drive. (got to get it all working first though)

This should still put me in the 2hr window that I have set for myself although it would be even quicker if I could just attach the images and boot the VM.

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I’ll let you know if I succeed.

this is kind of a back burner research and development project for me right now, but if I figure it out I will also post back.

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I don’t think you can dual boot Windows 7 and VMware on the backup machine, you probably need another disk with VMware. This will mean 3 disks, Windows 7 boot, VMware boot and Data for a copy of the VMs.

I have succeeded! My Windows servers now build straight from the image with only minor tweaking required. Might be a new post in the making.

cheers, Paul

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What are you using for imaging software?

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What are you using for imaging software?

Boot with Windows PE and then use imagex. It only does an offline image, but that’s all I need for the roll out as the image has been sysprepped.

cheers, Paul

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I am familiar with that process (never used it on servers though, just to deploy workstations).

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Tricky with servers that have 5 partitions!

cheers, Paul

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You can use the DOS version of Symantec Ghost (ver 11.5 is the latest), you could also use Backup Exec System Recovery CD to do a backup although you might have to load your RAID drivers.

We have used both products when we are getting ready to deploy any of servers or workstations. We will Ghost the system many times during the config just in case we screw something up or find programs that don’t work properly.

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I think Paul’s need and mine are different. I need to make images on the live running server on a schedule so I don’t think ghost will cut it. I need to look into Backup Exec system recovery. I could ask you all about how it works but I bet it will be in the manual so I will check it out there…

I “thought” (or didn’t think) that the System state backup in backup exec would still require me to install the Server OS and programs. But will look into the recovery CD.

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System State takes a copy of the major files and registry, so in theory the server will return from bare bones. You do need to install Windows, including drivers, to recover the data so it’s not quite as simple as it might be.

cheers, Paul

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Hello,

I have a shiny new HP ML370 G6 running 64bit 2008 R2. This unit has 8-146gb hard drives with two in a RAID 1 on the internal controller for the OS and the other six in RAID volume on an added controller for data.

Does anyone here have any suggestions of a good solution for a bare metal backup that can restore in a minimal amount of time?

I hope I am not jumping the gun here but I am surprised that StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server edition has not been mentioned already. Bare metal recovery is bread and butter for this software in the Windows arena.

I am unsure of what the destination is for your current Backup Exec solution is but possibly continue that for regular data backups and use ShadowProtect on your OS partition to secure your system configuration/software etc. It uses VSS heavily and can image servers live with this technology so incremental snapshots can be made.

So if the server did fall over you could build to new hardware with HIR and then restore data from Backup Exec. There isn’t anything to say you couldn’t migrate to Shadowprotect entirely for your data also but as I said it depends on your destination i.e. tapes / removable hard disks etc.

P.S. I don’t mean to sound like a sales representative in this post but I have used this product within my employment and it has proved itself quite a few times. I can vouch for the support being top notch too (well in the Australian division at least).

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Thanks for your suggestion, I will look at it.

I am currently waiting delivery of a new workstation that has been spec’ed with extra disks on which i can match the server volume sizes.

This will be used as a workstation with the understanding that if the server blows, the images will be restored on it and it will be used for the server.

I plan to push the server images onto a share on the above mentioned workstation. I will then either restore into vmware workstation or pull the Windows 7 drive and restore directly to the spare drives. I hope to image weekly and pull data from the backup exec disk2disk backup (usb based).

I will test my restore ideas and post back whatever solution I find. I am targeting a 2hr or less downtime from a total disaster.

One thing that is messing with me is that while my onsite backups are disk2disk my offsites are tape. The only tape drive too which I have access for a restore is on the server

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The only tape drive too which I have access for a restore is on the server

Welcome to the world of disaster recovery. ;-))

You could use eSATA disks for backup?

cheers, Paul

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Hi,

I still have not succeeded in my quest to restore the server image into a virtual environment. It seems that the HAL is just too different from the actual server hardware to work. I am going to switch gears and attempt to restore to an actual workstation and leave the virtual environment out of the picture. I have spent a bunch of time and tried a bunch of different things but always roadblock somewhere. The idea behind restoring in a virtual environment was that I could do it remotely from anywhere with an internet connection thus pulling travel time out of the 2hr window limit I have set for myself.

If I have to go to installing directly on real hardware, I will lose 45min of the window between travel time and reconfiguring drives on the physical box.

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You cannot restore directly to a virtual environment, you will need to import the backup image – this sorts out the drivers and HAL.

cheers, Paul

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You cannot restore directly to a virtual environment, you will need to import the backup image – this sorts out the drivers and HAL.

cheers, Paul

Paul,

I am not sure I am following you here. I am using the built in Windows server 2008 R2 image backup for the images. I have tried to directly mount the image but it will not boot (I get the boot system disk not found error). I have tried to use the install DVD and do a restore of the image, this does not give the same error but gives a blue screen. Can you give me a link to what you mean by “importing” the backup image?

Thanks for your help.

Royce

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Paul,

Thanks for pointing me this direction. I am going to try a completely different track possibly starting with the following for a basis.

http://www.p2vbackup.com/p2vbtutorial.asp

Royce

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Seems the problem with MS backup to VHD is the disk drivers – as expected. I have found this nice Disk2VHD utility from Sysintenals which will get around the issue, but it must be run on a live system.
I suggest you create a regular P2V copy and make sure you have up to date backups. Then you can fire up the machine as a virtual box and restore the data as required.

Other options:
VMware Converter stand alone – needs VMware server as target.
XenConvert, but I think you need a running Xen server.

cheers, Paul

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I ran into another roadblock on VMware’s converter. It currently cannot access the VSS service on a 64bit system . I really wanted this one to work as it can be run from the command line so I could automate the whole process via the task scheduler.

I have used Disk2VHD to move XP workstations onto windows 7 workstations as VMs but have not used it on servers. I will give it a try.

I AM GOING TO GET THIS WORKING YET.

Oh Well, I am learning a lot about virtual machines……

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Virtual machines are the ant’s pants!

cheers, Paul

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I agree. I just am having no end of trouble making this particular application work the way I want…

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OK,

Here is the progress so far. I have been able to use the sysinternals Disk2VHD utility to convert the machine. DO not run that utility directly from the drive you are imaging or you will take a huge performance hit.

I then tried to attach the disks in virtual PC. I immediately run into the partition is too large for the IDE bus message. (this is correct as both of these partitions are above the 127gb IDE limit.)

As virtual PC only allows attachment of IDE disks, this eliminates it as the VM carrier. I now switch to VMware and add a step, converting the VHD files to VMDK files using the STARWIND converter. This allows me to not only convert to VMware format but also to convert from IDE to SCSI drives.

Next step, see if the converted drives will boot in VMware workstation, player or server.

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Have you tried the VHD files in Hyper-V (Win 2008)?

cheers, Paul

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No joy,

VMware player will bluescreen with the following stop error 0x0000007B

This has to be disk driver related but I cannot seem to get it sorted…..

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No,

This is the only 2008 server I have to play with.

I may need to load a testserver to sort this though..

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mercyh,

I would recommend you check out this as it may help you along your way and is free as far as the stand alone edition goes.

https://www.vmware.com/products/converter/faqs.html

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Josh B

Thanks for the tip. I thought that would work also, however, that is the tool I was using back in post 32 that at this time does not support windows 64 bit systems…..

I can get into the command line using the F2 key when the vm boots and can see the disks and files. I know there is a way to change that disk driver, but last night at 1:00am I could not figure out HOW to do it.

P T,

Thanks for helping me with hints and suggestions so far.

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Josh B

Thanks for the tip. I thought that would work also, however, that is the tool I was using back in post 32 that at this time does not support windows 64 bit systems…..

Sorry about that mercyh I should have read the thread in it’s entirety before posting. Hopefully I can chime in again with some more useful information next time.

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Sorry about that mercyh I should have read the thread in it’s entirety before posting. Hopefully I can chime in again with some more useful information next time.

No problem, I have done that too many times myself on long threads.

Thanks for your suggestions, I am taking any and all tips at this point….

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I am going to chime back in again as I remember I did post in this thread originally suggesting Storagecraft Shadowprotect. I’m sure if you’re going for completely free products or just weighing up best options for the cost.

ShadowProtect has it’s own VSS provider for doing live backups and the image format is compatible with VMware Converter but I’ve not been through the process myself as yet so unsure of any caveats.

It is available as a 30 day trial so it might be worth your time in looking at it. As per my previous post in this thread I am not a representative from Storagecraft just a happy customer of their IT Edition / Server / Desktop editions.

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I have not tried that product. I am not set on 100% free although if it can be done that way I am all for it. I have a couple more things to try with the process I am using now and if they don’t work I will start working in that direction.

It seems that the correct harddisk driver for the VM is not available in the image. There are several procedures outlined on the web to get it there. I have limited time I can test with this as the server I am working on is live and in use 24/7.

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An update on this.

I have come to a dead end with the “free” tools at this point. The frustrating thing is that I don’t understand why. That HP server has a load of HP specific drivers and management utilities. I went into the registry on the image and set all those not to run. I then installed a clean Server 2008 R2 VM so I could look at the drivers and registry on it. I copied the System32drivers directory from the clean install and added everything that was missing into my P2V image System32drivers directory. I then went through the HKLMSYSTEMControlSet001SERVICES and compared all the disk drivers to the clean VM. I disabled all the Compaq and HP stuff so it would not run on startup and enabled the ones that were enabled on the clean VM. I am at the same place I was when I started. (BSOD with the disk error)

I know this stuff works because I have done it several times with workstations, however, none of them were 64bit and none had 8 drives on proprietary RAID controllers.

I am thinking of downloading the trial of ShadowProtect although I HATE messing with this stuff on a live production server.

Thanks to all who have made suggestions and given tips so far….

Royce

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I am thinking of downloading the trial of ShadowProtect although I HATE messing with this stuff on a live production server.

Just some information on that,

– You will have to reboot so the ShadowProtect system DLL’s / services / vss providers are loaded.
– Recovery media is not included in the trial online. You would have to request an evaluation unless they’ve changed how things work. As the recovery environment is PE3.0 (Win7/08) based or PE2.0 (Vista) based and is around 300-400MB.

You will however be able to test the SPF > VMware Converter import as far as I know unless there is a limitation on x64 systems which I’m not aware of.

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An update….

I have installed ShadowProtect server. (A fine piece of software and I am still learning what it is capable of doing.). I have been experiementing with various backup settings and with the ImageManager that allows replication of images to other locations and can consolidate differentials into single images.

The key for me is their VirtualBoot technology. This is a P2V that actually works, and works quite quickly. I was able to boot an image of my server on Virtualbox and login to the SQL database in about 20 minutes. The VM conversion took about 2 minutes. The VM then booted with the message that windows was not shutdown correctly and after selecting “boot windows normally” I was able to login to the server. Windows began detecting new hardware and spent about 8 minutes installing drivers and reconfiguring. I was then asked to reboot and after logging in I installed the VirtualBox VM tools. This prompted another reboot and after the machine came back up I was able to login to my shares and the SQL server like normal.

The packages that I intend to license are the ShadowProtect server and ImageManager enterprise (this allows me to replicate the images to a share on the local machine that I intend to use as a host for the VM and to the server at my home for offsite backup) The cost for these two modules is around $1300. I consider this a good value to achieve a restore time of around 30 minutes.

A special thanks to Josh B, for pointing me in this direction.

I also want to thank all the others that have chimed in on this thread with hints and suggestions. Your input has allowed me to research different ideas and come up with what I think is a very workable solution.

I will post back in a few weeks with the status of this. If anyone else is in the same situation where they need a very quick bare metal recovery time, I would be glad to visit with them and share my research on this. I realize that even the $1300 may be out of budget for some and I was lucky that the organization that I am working with saw the value in this project. I had found another way to get their mission critical processes up in around 4 hours that was much less spendy, however, they took my recommendation on this and went with the shorter and more reliable process.

Thanks so much for pointing me in this direction

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Well, ShadowProtect ImageManager gave me a sore head yesterday afternoon. I was on my way to another town when I got a call that the system I was using that on was down. I headed back into town and found that ImageManager was trying to replicate an image to another drive and had swallowed up all the system network resources even though I had it throttled to 30%. I could not stop the process as when I tried the system would freeze completely. The service would restart on reboot and put the server in the exact same state. I finally had to stop the service from starting on boot to get the facility back in business. I then tried to uninstall and it failed with an error that indicated that it could not find the install source. I finally loaded REVO and removed it with that. The facility was down about 3 1/2hrs which is a lifetime in the medical world.

More research and testing is needed before I can give this piece of software a full thumbs up. I may need to rethink my offsite backup and go back to rotating drives offsite.

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ShadowProtect has officially been eliminated as a possible solution to my disaster recovery challange. The performance hit was just too great. The problem with this install is that there is no low use time. The least used is from 11:45pm to about 2:30am but even during this timeframe someone is always using the database. I am looking at a much lower tech solution to disaster recovery. I think it will have to involve some paper

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Given the capacity of the server I don’t think there is a viable low cost solution. The good news is that server is robust enough to survive pretty much anything short of a direct lightening strike.
I would concentrate on monitoring the server hardware to allow you to sort problems before they impact use – HP have free software to do the job but you should use two machines to do the monitoring – to be sure, to be sure.

cheers, Paul

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Paul,

That is the conclusion I have also reached. I do have the thing about as protected from electrical failure as it can get. The problem with the medical business is that I am required to have a written disaster recovery plan that will show that I can recover from any scenario in a way and in a timeframe that does not compromise patient care.

In this case the all important documents are the Medication orders (which drugs to give which patients when) and the Treatment orders. In the Hospital setting these change hourly, in the nursing home setting they may change daily or they could be the same for months. We are now going to print the orders to PDF three times a week and replicate them to multiple workstations and to the backup that goes offsite. In the event of total failure these could be printed and distributed to the caregivers and care could continue without risking patient safety.

I would not say that the time spent on this project is wasted. (Is any tech experience ever a total waste?) I learned quite a bit about my own systems and processes in particular and understand a bit more of the guts of Server 2008 R2 in general….

Thanks again to all that chimed in with tips and encouragement, and shared their knowledge, experience and insight…. Without you I would be back on page 2 of this process.

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I like the print to PDF idea but I would be very careful where they are stored. Confidentiality must come first with patient data.

cheers, Paul

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I like the print to PDF idea but I would be very careful where they are stored. Confidentiality must come first with patient data.

cheers, Paul

Thanks for inserting that warning into the thought process. They will be stored on workstations spread throughout the facility that already have access to patient data (and are secured to protect this access). The offsite backups are encrypted.

The thing that tipped this decision this direction is that any other method of recovery required the availability of one or two tech employees. We did not see how we could guarantee a 4hr response and recovery time with this limited human resource. The PDFs can be printed by any of 10 or 15 office/medical records employees and the procedure is easy to write up in a way that anyone could do it with access to the proper passwords.

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I would use Fatsone, They sell a back-up sever that comes with unlimited license and you can do a full back-up image. That will do a Bare Metal Restore. You can also deploy it to client machines.

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