Server Backup questions

[Macinator]

I am new to the world of Open Edge.

We are running a product that seems very involved as far as setup (at least fromt he perspective of someone who is new).

They have setup backups and AI but I want to cover the recovery of the entire server in case of disaster.

This is a physical server. Can you use a product like Symantec System Recovery and/or Acronis's solution to take a live image of the server that can be restored to another server? Will this cause any sort of corruption when the VSS snapshot takes place? It would run off hours to the momentary lock causes would not be an issue for users.

The vendor has concerns about the database being restored properly but I would have the backups and AI files on other servers.

So basically 2 questions -
1 - Will the backup cause issues
2 - Will a restore of this type of backup to another server leave me with a fuctional server? With the databases mount so a restore of the most current data be possible?

Thank you,

Scott

 

[TomBascom]

Maybe.

A lot depends on the details.

A modern snapshot product that properly synchronizes everything should work. VMotion for instance. But it is also well worth testing. It isn't the kind of thing that you want to take chances with.

(Personally I don't trust anything from anyone who sells anti-virus malware, they've sold too much snake oil over the years for me to consider them trustworthy -- but that's just my opinion...)

 

[Macinator]

Excellent - I was more worried about the VSS lock causing an issue. I am not tied to that snake oil. Have to agree on many of their products.

Thank you for the response,

Scott

 

[repostor]

So there is no need to set the Progress OpenEdge databases in a certain mode before the snapshot is executed?
For example in DB2 you have to perform a Quisce, in Oracle "begin/end" backup; in PostgreSQL "start/end" backup, and in MySQL there are similare ways.

Are you really sure that this will work?
In the EMC world, this would be called "Fuzzy backup", and on other modern databases, you can not restore to any point in time, if you are performing that way of doing backups.

 

[TomBascom]

It depends on how the snapshot is being done. If you are using a tool that sits above the OS or the SAN then you need to first enable a "quiet point".

But SAN level tools (or tools like VMotion) have intimate knowledge about the state of the filesystem and they /can/ do it without a quiet point IF they get all of the pieces of the db in a synchronized fashion. But, like I said, it needs to be carefully tested. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking that something like this works only to find out at the worst possible moment that it only "worked" on your test system because you had a tiny little database with no significant activity taking place.

 

[cj_brandt]

For our database backups we have AI enabled for point in time recovery.
We enable the quiet point
We use the SAN utility to "snap" the OS files for a backup.
We disable the quiet point.

When using this method, you'll need to look at the Sequence option of rfutil when you apply AI files to a snapped image.