Recovering Windows cluster on different hardware

Question

We have a Windows cluster with shared drives on our DMX. We are going to Sungard for a DR test and are going to try to recover the Windows server. We have asked Sungard to configure the drives like we have at home. Are there any other requirements that we need? Has anybody recovered a cluster to different hardware and are there any procedures to follow?

dynamox · Accepted Answer

you also have other cluster resources that will need to be modified, for example ip resources. It depends how your cluster is configured but a lot of times physical disk resources have ip resources set as pre-requisites ..until those come online ..disk resources will not. It would be interesting to test this restore procedure in a lab environment.

dynamox · Answer

Danne,are you going to replicate the quorum drive ?

SKT2 · Answer

when we go to sunguard for HP-UX recovery we get the similar hardware and storage.But never recovered a cluster setup itselfMessage was edited by: santhosh theyyan

dynamox · Answer

ok ..i think it's going to be tricky with drive signatures. MS Clustering relies on disk signatures to identify physical resources. There are microsoft tools that allow you to read/write signature to the drive. I would find these tools and document what those signatures are. Then when the system is ready to be restored, you will need to write those signatures to corresponding LUNs/ Drive letters.

Danne-Murphy · Answer

We are restoring all drives from tape using networker. It is my understanding that the cluster info is backed up are part of the system state.

dynamox · Answer

Ok ..i rememberd what it was http://dumpcfg.com/

dynamox · Answer

so is system state being restored ? If they are re-installing everything from scratch .including reconfiguring cluster services ..then there is no need to mess with signatures. As long as MS cluster services get populated with correct LUNs/ drive letters ..SQL will find it's mdf files.

Danne-Murphy · Answer

We are trying to get away from reinstalling the app at Sungard. We are hoping that by restoring all drives and system state that the app will work. I think the issue will be with the drive signatures and the cluster service associating the signature with the cluster resource. I think that utility will help in fixing the signatures. I just did not know if that was the only potential issue that we might have. I had to believe that others have gone through this before. Thanks for your thoughts

Danne-Murphy · Answer

We have a UNISYS ES7000 server at home, but recover to HP servers at Sungard. We recover 20 other windows servers, however most of them are not clustered and the other ones are built and sql server installed and the databases restored. This is an pplication server and the SAs have a difficult timre re-installing the app and getting it to work.

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Recovering Windows cluster on different hardware

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