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Intel platforms bare metal disaster recovery

Bare Metal Plus for Intel Platforms allows full crash recovery of any licensed backup system agent running on an Intel compatible PC platform. Bare metal backs up a client’s main hard drive in a sequence of partition images. This version uses a Linux based bare metal boot media.

There are several fundamental things to understand about bare metal before getting started:

• Setup and configuration of some client workstations must be done. This is because Bare Metal Plus is designed for crash recovery protection of client workstations, not the backup system.
• Bare Metal Plus only backs up the main hard drive on the first controller of the client.
• The client must have a CD-ROM drive.
• Bare Metal Plus supports bootable CD version.

The bare metal CD version creates an ISO CDROM image for a given client. This image can then be used to burn a CD specific for each client. It is suggested that you generate a CD for every client and keep it in a sleeve next to the client for emergency use in the event of a crash.

A hard disk attached to a PC is sectioned into areas called partitions. Each partition could be a separate operating system (such as Windows on partition-1 and UNIX on partition-2), or the disk could be split into file systems for a particular operating system. For example, Windows would make partition-1 the C: drive and partition-2 the D: drive. Bare Metal Plus will backup all partitions on the main disk without regard to their underlying operating system. We refer to this as an image backup.

The rationale behind image backups is:

• The system image backup is fast because it only backs up the real data on the drive, not empty blocks of unreferenced data.
• There are never issues with locked or open files when backing up the client because the entire image is of a non-running, cleanly shutdown client.
• The restore process is simple avoiding the complexities of installing and configuring specific operating systems.

Potential problems during a recovery are minimized due to its simplicity.

ClosedTo create a bare metal boot CD

After the clients and D2D devices have been configured, create a bare metal boot CD for each client which is bare metal aware. The bare metal boot media is created using the backup system’s console interface. For physical systems, connect to the backup system console. For virtual systems, connect to the backup system VM within your hypervisor.

1 From the backup system’s console interface menu, enter option 4 for Advanced Options, then 1 for Bare Metal Media Creation.
2 On the Bare Metal support screen, type 2, in the Please enter choice field for Cold Bare Metal Media.
3 Select the client for which a bare metal backup needs to be done.
4 In the Is the root disk on the client IDE? [Default is NO] field, enter one of the following:
• Leave this blank or type N to indicate the root disk on the client is SCSI.
• Type Y to indicate the root disk on the client is IDE.
5 Enter the Network Gateway of the client.
6 Enter 255.255.255.0 in the Netmask field.
7 In the Is there a firewall between the client and System? field, enter Y to indicate there is a firewall or N to indicate there is not a firewall.
8 In the Do you want your Cold Bare Metal backup to start automatically when booting from the CD that you have created? field, enter Y to start the backup automatically or N if you do not want the backup to start automatically.

The creation of the ISO begins automatically.

9 Once the ISO has been created, map the share on which the ISO was created and burn the ISO to a CD. The following prompt appears, telling you the location of the ISO and how to access it:

The CD (baremetal-<client_name>.iso) has been created. Please map the CIFS share \\<DPU_IP>\baremetals to access and burn the ISO.