Re: HA Server Backup Tool/Process recommendations needed (XP Pro only)

[Chris Hunter <cjhunter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

'wonder if Time Machine in Leopard offers any options here ?

Chris

PS: how long do people expect a HD to last, in an 24/7 HA context ...
maybe some are better than others ... five years, maybe ???


On 30 Oct 2007, at 21:56, Paul Gordon wrote:

> Hi David.
>
> There's more than one question in there, and therefore, more than one
> answer!
>
> Mirroring the disk would protect you against "catastrophic
failure"
> but
> not against "accidental deletion", you would have to adopt
different
> strategies for these two scenarios.
>
> I would personally be very happy to use simple RAID 1 mirroring (and
> indeed I do) of a system disk. I think this is better than just
> having a
> hot/warm/cold standby disk, as if one of the mirrored disks dies, the
> server carries on with no interruption. Most (all?) standby strategies
> involve at least a small interruption to service as the standby
> disk is
> bought online... (and this may require manual intervention). Mirroring
> can be done at both the hardware level and in software (IIRC XP PRO
> supports software RAID 0 & 1 using dynamic disks, but if I also
> remember
> correctly, dynamic disks can't be imaged with Ghost et al.. so you
> have
> an either / or choice)...
>
> Regular backups are easy to arrange, either file based, or image
> based.
> Image based obviously has the advantage of being able to do a
"bare
> metal" restore to a blank disk fairly quickly. - However, if you
had a
> mirrored disk, the likelihood that you'd need to do this is
> diminished.
>
> Have you considered virtualisation at all? - either VMWARE or MS
> Virtual
> PC can run on top of XP quite happily. Running a single guest VM on
> top
> of the host machine rarely (IME) makes much of a dent in the
> performance
> of the host machine, provided it's not a completely ancient spec
> (anything based on P4 or newer seems OK, - so anything made in the
> last
> 5 years basically). The biggest impact is to the memory, so usually
> adding another stick of RAM to the machine is enough to keep it all
> running happily. VMs can be very rapidly brought back online on
> another
> machine in the event of almost any kind of failure. (You do have to
> protect the virtual hard disk file of course) - This may not be an
> option though if you have specific hardware requirements for the HA
> server, although most serial and USB devices can be mapped through
> into
> the VM.
>
>
> Food for thought, anyway.
>
> Paul G.
>
>
>
>>
>> I have scheduled data backups and I have a fall-back light switch
>> scheme, but rebuilding onto a new hard disk still took several
hours.
>> I am considering a hot or cold standby machine, or even cold
standby
>> hard drive, but also have to balance risk/cost.
>>
>> So what would you do for backing up an HA server against
catastrophic
>> failure as well as accidental deletions?
>>
>> Server runs XP Pro (no choice on that ... it's not going to Vista
and
>> I can't get/afford WS2003)
>> Slightly inconvenient to attach external drive directly so could
>> consider this on an occasional basis.
>>
>> How good/bad is BIOS/hardware SATA RAID on most motherboards from
the
>> point of view mirroring and surviving a single hard disk failure ?
>>
>> What is easiest/cheapest/quickest disaster recovery tool to get a
>> machine rebuilt quickly ? Especially interested if they can have
>> scheduled backups to a NAS to avoid having to clamber about with
the
>> external drive.
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> David
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>