Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) Restore
Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) is a disk-based disaster recovery feature that enables administrators to restore an entire system environment for an individual computer. A full recovery using Bare Metal Recovery includes the operating system, point-in-time backed-up data, and Exchange, SQL Server, and Oracle applications if applicable. Uses for Bare Metal Recovery include disaster recovery and replicating a node's environment, applications, and data.
A Bare Metal Recovery restore runs outside the DPX interfaces. You boot the destination machine from the Bare Metal Recovery media, provide minimal information about the backup job and the storage system, and select the backup instance to recover.
This page outlines the restore. The feature is documented in detail starting with Bare Metal Recovery Overview.
Requirements
To perform a Bare Metal Recovery, you need:
- The Bare Metal Recovery media – a disc, an ISO image file, or a USB image for the operating system being recovered.
See BMR ISO Image Extraction and Driver Installation. - A bare machine – the restore destination. Bare Metal Recovery is designed to recover to dissimilar hardware, but a recovery to a machine whose hardware configuration differs from the source may require additional steps.
See Bare Machine Considerations. - A Block backup that includes the BMR volume – Bare Metal Recovery restores from Block backups only.
See Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) Backup and Running Backups. - The location of the backup – the backup job name, the node name, and the address and credentials of the storage system that holds the backup.
See Tracking Important Information.
Requirements specific to the operating system being recovered are listed in Requirements for Recovering a Windows Machine and Requirements for Recovering a Linux Machine.
Procedure
A Bare Metal Recovery is initiated from the bare machine, not from the DPX interfaces. Regardless of the operating system being recovered, the recovery goes through the following stages:
- Initiate BIOS or UEFI on the bare machine, select the optical drive or the USB drive as the first boot device, and boot the machine from the Bare Metal Recovery media. The Bare Metal Recovery wizard opens.
- Enter the address, the type, and the credentials of the storage system that holds the backup – Catalogic vStor, NetApp ONTAP, or Catalogic OSS (DPX Open Storage Server) – and connect to it.
- Select the recovery point: the volume on the storage system, the node, the backup job, and the snapshot to recover.
- Map the drives of the source machine to the drives of the bare machine and select the drives to recover.
- Start the recovery. Once it completes, reboot the machine into the recovered environment.
The wizard and the exact sequence of dialogs differ between the two platforms, so follow the detailed procedure for the operating system being recovered.
Recovery from a Replicated or Alternate Data Resource
A Bare Metal Recovery backup replicated to an alternate storage system can be recovered to a bare machine at the site of that alternate storage system.
When restoring data from a vStor replica (alternate secondary node), disconnect the replication relationship that involves the replica volume and issue an NFS share for the replica so that it is accessible for DPX. Otherwise, the Bare Metal Recovery procedure will fail.
For more information, see the following topics in vStor 4.16 Documentation: