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budchawlaFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Standby server for disaster recovery

Hi all,
Just looking at sourcing a standby server (for DR purposes) in an SBS2003 context... The main server is going to be a reasonably meaty dual xeon, raid-5 Dell 1900.

In your experiences (with bare-metal / other restores), is one only safe with exactly identical hardware? Would the standby (to be used only as a stopgap) need to have two processors? what about the disk array? memory? I have had easy restores and nightmare restores, and most of the nightmares were caused by either a poor quality backup (or problems within AD etc), or if there was a generation gap between the source and destination servers.

Would you be confident to recommend a standby server if it was a lower model server, with a different motherboard, one less CPU etc?

Cheers,

-bud
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DanKoster
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Hi guys, thank you both for your comments.
Dan - if it's only a matter of 2 extra hours during the recovery, I don't see that as a problem, and that would also potentially save up to 2K on the cost of the standby hardware. However, if you were specifying the equipment, would you be confident to spec a different box?

pdxsrw - my scenario is really more disaster oriented than hardware failure oriented, and unless I'm totally mistaken, dell warranties will not cover anything but hardware failure, and its a small fire, minor flood, electrical madness etc. that's the kind of localised disaster I'm planning for, since we don't often get hurricanes here! and I definitely am not planning to have the standby sitting next to the main unit - that wouldn't be clever! there are already usb, tape and online backup routines and mx backups in place, but nothing to prevent the delay of either waiting for replacement hardware to arrive or the nightmare of trying to restore to different hardware.

the reason I'm only worried about minor disasters is that for this particular client, if their building burns down to the ground, they will have nothing but time to get the server back up and running!

thanks!
Avatar of Jeffrey Kane - TechSoEasy
Hi budchawla,

I would agree that having a backup machine is really a waste of money unless the goal is to restore within minutes.

Please take a moment to review SBS's backup guide which includes how to do bare-metal restores and what the requirements are:
http://sbsurl.com/backup

Then, you may want to also listen to these two podcasts regarding disaster recovery from a couple of the SBS MVP's:
http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode3.mp3
http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode4.mp3

There is also a very good disaster recovery planning guide on the Microsoft Small Business Website:
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/toolkit/module.aspx?mid=131

Lastly, take a look at this powerpoint presentation from TechEd06 on SBS Disaster recovery:
http://www.sbsfaq.com/Downloads/SBS%202003%20R2%20Disaster%20Recovery.ppt  (if a permissions box pops up, just cancel and the ppt will open).

Jeff
TechSoEasy
Jeff, thanks as always... there's a lot of info there that I've had a quick look at but will take some time to properly digest.

To clarify a little bit, my goal essentially is to get things up and running to 100% (domain, exchange, business data) within about 24 hours. In case of a localised disaster or server meltdown, sourcing replacement hardware is not too much of an issue as long as there is flexibility in hardware spec. Otherwise, waiting for identical hardware from Dell could mean a wait of upto 2 weeks, and that's IF identical hardware is still available a year or 2 down the line...
-> I found the PCI controller idea (from the PPT) very interesting, have you used that technique?
From the first link you sent, I have read that document before. That seems to me like a major standby server recommendation, since they recommend the same:

* SCSI controller. You can restore to a computer that has an IDE controller if the original computer had SCSI. (SATA RAID Controller in this case, which is Dell, so would need a Dell???)
* Motherboard chip set. (toughie without a standby server)
* Number of processors. (easy to match with separate hardware)
* Hard disk size. The new computer’s hard disk should contain matching volumes the same size or larger than those on the original computer. (easy to match with separate hardware)
* Drive letter of the boot partition. (easy to match with separate hardware)
* We recommend restoring to the same brand and model as the original computer. (either don't use Dell, or get a standby server!)

What do you guys recommend?
budchawla,

I haven't tried the PCI controller idea.  Also, the restrictions listed in the backup document (which you noted above) are not to be interpreted as a COMPLETE barrier to restoring on different hardware.  If you need to do that, then it is certainly possible.  Please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/249694 for details on what would need to be done.

The key point for being able to restore a server is to have the full backup done nightly and removed from the premises on a daily basis.

I should also point out that another method I've used for DR with some clients is Acronis True Image Server for Windows with Universal Restore.  
Running your backup with Acronis True Image will allow you to restore to any hardware.  Additionally, the initial image can be done onsite, and then nightly incremental backups can be done over ftp to the original in another location.  For a couple clients, I have their backups run normally with SBS's built-in, and then Acronis will run an incremental backup to a hosted private server I user for such purposes.


Jeff
TechSoEasy
Hi all,

Jeff - On the KB you linked to, it's funny that it doesn't even explicitly say that it applies to SBS (but it says Server2K3), but what's more interesting is the line "Microsoft does not support restoring a system state backup from one computer to a second computer of a different make, model, or hardware configuration." - and more than interesting, it's discouraging! It goes on to say that they will provide "commercially reasonable efforts" to support a restore on different hardware, but that means that at some point they'll put their hands up and walk away if it all goes pear-shaped!

OK, but MS-speak apart, it seems the consensus is no standby server. (I'm surprised by this, but happy to accept it)

If you were to have to commit to a single DR procedure today and stick to that for the foreseeable future for all clients and yourselves, what would you guys choose. One that gives you as close to 100% assurance of a successful recovery but obviously keeping in mind that SMB budgets aren't even close to unlimited...

Thanks!
One more thing :-), what tape drive specifically would you guys recommend using at the moment? I generally find that DAT72 is nowhere near the capacity needed, and the LTO drives would be half the cost of a standby server - which is why I've been using USB hard disks of late...
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