Bare Machine Recovery¶

Introduction¶

Cristie's Tivoli Bare Machine Recovery (TBMR) allows administrators to restore a physical or virtual machine backed up with TSM into a different hardware profile than the original machine.

TBMR has three parts, as does this guide to TBMR:

Part 1 - The restore preparations
Part 2 - The client part, that runs on each backup client machine
Part 3 - The restore procedure, to restore a server

The client part of TBMR profiles the backup client machine's hardware profile into a file which gets backed up by the TSM backup client. TBMR can only be used with servers that have been setup in this way before a crash.

The restore part requires a bootable ISO image on CD/DVD-ROM or USB or similar. For Linux this software is freely available, but for Windows it must be created by each BaaS customer itself due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions regarding right to redistribute. See the Restore Preparation step below for details on how to create the image.

TBMR Preparation Guide¶

Part one - Restore preparations¶

Safespring recommends all users to prepare and maintain bootable media of the recovery tool before the required use of the tool.

To restore a machine, the following preparatory steps need to be taken: 1. Retrieve the bootable ISO image 2. Prepare bootable media (CD/DVD or USB) with this bootable image 3. Recommended: Add to operational procedural documentation how restores are made 4. Recommended: Schedule tests of restore procedures

Preparation for restore on Linux¶

Retrieve the bootable ISO image.

The bootable ISOs of TBMR are available at Safespring's distribution site. Note that there is one version for 32-bit architectures and another for 64-bit.
Prepare bootable media (DVD or USB) with this bootable image.

Using your favorite method, prepare for example a DVD or USB drive with the ISO image retrieved in step 1.
Add to operational procedural documentation how restores are made.

Recommended step. More details/guidance to be included here in the future.
Schedule tests of restore procedures.

Recommended step. More details/guidance to be included here in the future.

Preparation for restore on Windows¶

Retrieve the bootable ISO image

In the case of Windows, the bootable ISOs of TBMR are not available at Safesprings's distribution site. The bootable images are based on WinPE 2 for 32-bit Windows and WinPE 4 for 64-bit Windows. This is due to Microsoft Licensing restrictions.

The solution is that each customer site creates its own 32-bit and 64-bit TBMR WinPE images. Cristie has a tool called CRISP that assists with this.

The requirements for this are:
- One 32-bit build-host.
- One 64-bit build-host.
- Two utilities from Microsoft's download site:
  - For 32-bit images: Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) (Cristie suggests the file 6001.18000.080118-1840-kb3aikl_en.iso
  - For 64-bit images: Microsoft Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (WADK) (Cristie suggests to search for "Microsoft Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (WADK) version 8" in the search bar to find a release dated 31 July 2012)
  - The CRISP tool comes with the TBMR Suite, which is found at Safespring's distribution site (SetupTBMRSuiteXXX.exe).
For detailed instructions on the use of CRISP, please see the CRISP guide.
Prepare bootable media (CD or USB) with this bootable image

Using your favorite method, prepare for example a CD or USB drive with the ISO image retrieved in step 1.
Add to operational procedural documentation how restores are made

Recommended step. More details/guidance to be included here in the future.
Schedule tests of restore procedures

Recommended step. More details/guidance to be included here in the future.

Part 2 - Client Installation¶

Safespring's BaaS packaging for Windows and Linux¶

Safespring's BaaS packaging of TSM and TBMR installs the TBMR client on a backup client machine. As of 2015-07 this is supported on Windows platforms and this is the now recommended installation method.

Manual Installation on e.g Redhat Linux¶

Prerequisites are a working Safespring Backup TSM installation on the machine in question.

Install

RPMs are found at Safespring's distribution site

# 64-bit client example:
wget https://archive.service.safedc.net/tbmr/Linux/tbmr-7.1-2.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh tbmr-7.1-2.x86_64.rpm

Extract Serial
```
cd /TBMRCFG
echo > /TBMRCFG/`licmgr --sig`.sig
```
N.B. TBMR will be automatically licensed during Q3. Until then, please contact Safespring for a temporary license.
Generate system profile

Run tbmrcfg (see also the tbmrcfg man page):
```
tbmrcfg -- help
```
Either run tbmrcfg without parameters to save system configuration (default)
```
tbmrcfg
```
...or save system configuration information for system using grub installed on /dev/sda:
```
tbmrcfg -b grub -d /dev/sda
```
Verify the file /TBMRCFG/disrec.ini
```
ls -l /TBMRCFG/disrec.ini
less /TBMRCFG/disrec.ini
```
Run an incremental backup using IBM TSM backup-archive client
```
dsmc i
```
Schedule a run of tbmrcfg to ensure that the system can recover to the latest version. Always run tbmrcfg and incremental backup after system changes.

Part 3 - Restoring using TBMR¶

To perform a restore of a machine with TBMR, the following steps must be taken:

Locate a replacement machine for the broken machine
Boot the replacement machine with the bootable image, having Internet network access
Generate a new password for the node via API or portal
Enter the node name (12 characters A-Z) and password into the booted tool.
Optionally add any additional missing drivers for the new machine
Optionally partition the devices for the new machine
Restore the old machine into a new system

More information¶

For further details at this point, please see:

Restore of a Linux machine¶

Make a bootable USB or DVD with tbmr-7.1.2.linux.x86_64.iso
Boot into the recovery environment using the ISO. X11 based Linux recovery environment is recommended. Automatic recovery wizard is recommended.
Provide the following TSM server information:
- Server address
- Port
- Node name
- Password (You will probably have to rekey the node beforehand, since the client rotates passwords)
Configure network
Read configuration data from backup
- Get configuration
- Click next to start the recovery process
- Confirm partition settings
Reboot into recovered OS