Differentiating Opforce and Bare Metal Restore

A VERITAS Positioning Whitepaper

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VERSION 2

Proper sales positioning of

Veritas™ opforce™ and

bare metal restore

How to Properly Position OpForce and Bare Metal Restore in Sales Presentations

The purpose of this white paper is to clarify the positioning of OpForce and Bare Metal Restore in the minds of customers. This paper identifies specific areas where the products appear to overlap, and examines each of these areas to determine why BMR or OpForce is best suited for specific applications.

A brief examination of the sales collateral from the two products reveals that there are many common concepts and terms used by both products. Superficial examination of the two products makes them appear to overlap. However, upon detailed examination of the two products with customer use and deployment in mind, it is readily apparent that OpForce and BMR are very different in addressing customer needs. This paper identifies specific areas where the products appear to overlap, and examines each of these areas to determine how and why BMR or OpForce is best suited for the particular task.

Let us look more closely at BMR and OpForce to identify the sweet spots of each product, determine where they overlap, and distill the information down to practical sales recommendations.

*The product requirements section is not intended to present limitations of either BMR or OpForce. It is to point out that BMR works with NetBackup to product simplified server recovery. Without NetBackup, users cannot get the benefits of the BMR product. While the OpForce product has integration with the VERITAS File System and VERITAS Volume Manager today (and with other products tomorrow), it is delivered as a standalone product and does not require or work in conjunction with another VERITAS product to deliver server automation.

Sweet Spots FOR EACH PRODUCT

OpForce

VERITAS OpForce 3.0 enables you to optimize the utilization of your existing infrastructure by implementing on-demand computing services. With OpForce, you can easily perform any of the following operations:

• Auto-discover your servers, blade servers, and blade chassis assets in the bare-metal state (no OS available) as well as deployed state
• Create server pools that can be shared among multiple network segments or VLANs.
• Rapidly deploy and provision servers in a multi-tiered network environment
• Create system snapshots that contain a complete software environment (OS, applications, network settings and personalization information) of your servers.
• Manage your server snapshot with built-in powerful cataloguing and profiling capabilities
• Remotely access and manage your servers
• Deploy applications, OS patches, and as well as quickly upgrade BIOS, Firmware, and RAID configurations on multiple systems
• Create server VIP pools on your load balancers, and add or delete severs automatically from a server pool
• Backup and restore the configurations of your switches, and server load balancers
• Standardize on an integrated provisioning tool for your Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows environments

In addition, OpForce provides you with comprehensive hardware and software inventory of your server assets, and provides a rich set of reports and detailed event logs. Moreover, its’ role-based administration capabilities allow you to divide and compartmentalize the tasks of server management amongst your system administrators.

OpForce server runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows platforms, and supports deployment, provisioning and configuration of Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows as managed servers. OpForce is a stand-alone product and does not need NetBackup or other software.

BMR

BMR is best used to recover a specific server in the case of a catastrophic system error, rebuilding the system to the exact state it was as at any point in time for which there exists a full or incremental backup to NetBackup. The BMR technology uses a concept of a system configuration, which is essentially an abstraction of a system that includes the NetBackup client images, the disk and network drivers, and disk partitioning/file system information. This “config” can be edited after the original system is dead and after a backup is taken, allowing a Windows system to be restored to completely different hardware.

Similarities and Differences

Both OpForce and BMR can be used to clone a system. Both can be used to bring a system back to a given point in time. Both can be used to recover a system to dissimilar hardware. The following is a detailed look at the perceived areas of their overlap:

Server Replication

It is possible to use BMR to replicate systems, but it will require some intervention. When BMR or OpForce replicates a Windows server, it will have the same SID as the source server. Both products require some intervention in order to prevent disrupting Windows Networking on the production environment. For example, the Microsoft Sysprep utility can be run before the backup or snapshot is performed, or a SID changing utility can be used prior to bringing the new system into the network.

On UNIX, any changed IP information is not persistent; BMR will restore the original configuration from the backup (for the current release and until BMR can do DSR for UNIX). The server must be taken off the network before the final reboot so that these changes can be made manually before disrupting networking.

OpForce is designed to replicate servers seamlessly.It uses the disk image technology to take a snapshot of the source server. The IP setting of each NIC and the server hostname of the destination server are done at the time of the provisioning.As a result, you can repurpose a server on the fly without the need to take it off the network.

OpForce canrecover a Windows or a Linux server in less than 15 minutes. BMR does nothing today to handle re-creation of vendor partitions, and hardware RAID configurations. BMR 4.6 does not handle Linux servers, however BMR 4.7 will introduce a BMR Linux server that can be used to recover Windows machines, and in version 5.0 plans to handle Linux BMR clients.

In certain server replication circumstances, BMR would be the better tool.For example, ifDynamic Disks are configured on a Windows system, OpForce cannot be used today to clone that server unlessthe target disks are identical in geometryto the ones on the source system used to generate the snapshot. BMR supports dissimilar disks and allows changes in both the sizes and types of Dynamic Disk partitions. However, in version 4.0 OpForce plans to support Dynamic Disks on Windows.

Point in time Server Recovery

It is possible to use OpForce to bring a system back to a point in time but it is not practical to use it in this capacity.To recover a system back to a point in time requires taking periodic server snapshots perhaps on a daily basis.To take a server image or snapshot OpForce requires that server be rebooted to an Administrative mode where the server is running system to be taken off line, and network booted into the Active OS. BMR uses NetBackup's incremental backup, which can be done while the system is inuse.

Dissimilar Server Restore

In restoring to a dissimilar system BMR offers more capabilities than OpForce. BMR has developed the technology to handle the complexity involved in recovering a Windows server to completely different hardware.

OpForce requires that you know ahead of time the hardware onto which you will be restoring the image. While that may be practical for planned migrations, it is not at all practical for Disaster Recovery.Migration or upgrade of entire Windows systems using BMR's DSR is much more practical and offers fewer limitations than does OpForce. BMR does not require the user to know ahead of time the hardware onto which the system will be restored. BMR also handles Windows 2000 Dynamic Disks, changes in the Kernel and Hardware Abstraction Layer,while OpForce does not handle Dynamic Disks, andrequires the systems to be brought down for snap shot imaging.

Summary

Once a system has been provisioned or re-provisioned with OpForce, it will develop a personality over time as new users, patches, applications, disks, and other customizations are performed. OpForce is ideal in Just-in-Time provisioning and deployment of servers in multi-tiered environment. BMR is ideal for bringing the system back to any point in time for which there exists a valid full or incremental backup using NetBackup.

It would be very prudent for a customer to use OpForce to deploy new systems, but then protect them with BMR for DR purposes after they are deployed. In fact, OpForce can deploy the new servers with NBU and BMR already installed.

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Copyright © 2003 VERITAS Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. Printed in USA and the EU. March 2002.