Disaster Recovery Rehearsal

So I’ve spent the whole weekend performing our DR plan and there are a bunch of things to learn from the whole experience. I will be posting a more in depth look at the process and its floors over the coming week, however I thought I would quickly cap a couple of the issues I encountered.

- When restoring a full system to dissimilar hardware via Backup Exec, the only reasonable option is to use the Intelligent Disaster Recovery boot disk. Its almost impossible to restore the system in a timely fashion by rebuilding the machine and restoring data and services.

- The MS Exchange info store isn’t restored with IDR. You need to create a dummy store and restore the mail into that.

- Restoring Exchange takes for ever! Plan to sit and wait 10 hours for a small-ish info store to be recovered.

- Multiple issues with Symantec products after the restore was complete. As ridiculous as it sounds, restoring from an IDR doesn’t restore Backup Exec or any of the Symantec products. You need to manually remove the installation files and reg-keys and do a new install.

I will be covering the above points more closely in my follow up posts. Watch this space.

Installing Backup Exec Remote agent on x64 System

Follow the following Symantec support article to install the Symantec Backup Exec x64 Remote Agent.

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/280701.htm

I browsed over the article and didn’t follow it step-by-step and couldn’t get the installation to work. Take particular note to mapping a network drive – this was the step I ignored and the installation failed.

On the remote x64 computer, map a drive letter to the Backup Exec for Windows Servers media server using the following path: \Program Files\VERITAS\Backup Exec\NT\Agents\RANT64EX (the scripts do not support UNC paths).

Also note that this is a silent installation – you won’t receive any success/fail feedback. Just check the Add/Remove Programs control panel item to confirm the installation was successful.