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Bare Metal Recovery for Windows

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

Bare Metal Recovery as part of a Disaster Recovery strategy allows for much quicker (re-)installations of original software and sophisticated automatic deployment and configuration management systems. For Windows environments, where automatic deployment and configuration management can become quite opaque, Bare Metal Recovery can be an important part of a Disaster Recovery plan. Bare Metal Recovery can save a lot of time and effort in virtualized environments, where all hardware looks identical to the guest operating systems (though it should be noted that, in virtualized environments, virtual machine backups backed by LUN snapshots in the SAN can be much more effective).

For these reasons, Bacula Systems has developed procedures and tools to provide Bare Metal Recovery capabilities to its customers. In this chapter, we introduce the tools and related procedures for Windows systems by guiding you through a complete setup and test run of the Bacula Systems Windows Bare Metal Recovery procedure.

File-Based or Image-Based

In general, for any sort of Bare Metal Recovery, a complete backup of the original system is required. This can be done not only at the file level, where individual files are backed up, but also on the disk image level, where complete disk content is backed up.

While both approaches have their pros and cons, we focus on the file based approach here. For image level backups, additional information can be found here.

Installation Environment

Bacula Enterprise Director and Storage Daemon components, used in the backup and restore of your Windows system, can run on any supported platform. Note that you will need to modify the Bacula Director configuration. Consider using a test installation on your network until you are confident that the changes will not affect your production backup system negatively.

We assume that you already have Bacula Enterprise installed including the required network connectivity i.e. all routers and firewalls involved should allow Bacula traffic as needed. In particular, this means that the Bacula Director must be able to connect to all machines you consider valid targets for BMR.

Since Bare Metal Recovery is used as a means to get critical systems up and running quickly, it is important to ensure that the procedures planned actually work. A good deal of this testing and fine-tuning today can be done in virtualized environments; however, Bacula Systems recommends testing on your physical hardware as well – only then can you be sure of your procedures.

Prerequisites

For testing and probably fine-tuning, we recommend that you define a “real” server system to use as the source of backups, and one unused server system as the target for a test of Bare Metal Recovery. You should only run this in virtual machines if your production environment is also virtualized. It may be necessary to pre-install drivers in the source system that match the hardware devices that will be required at recovery time if the expected replacement hardware differs from the existing. This can save time installing drivers during BMR.

The source and the target servers do not need to have Internet access, but this can make any troubleshooting procedure with our support easier.

Bacula Systems recommends that you go through the whole procedure to configure Recovery Media several times. We also suggest that you update your Disaster Recovery manually during those sessions to make sure your documented procedures really match what an operator will encounter. Although Bare Metal Recovery can save time when disaster strikes, it requires careful preparation, testing, and documentation beforehand.