Re: Backup - revisited

John--

"In theory RESTORE 21 is the exact opposite of SAVE 21. But this also assumes compatible hardware, save 21 did not bomb."

Well, compatible hardware is the easiest thing! As long as you have the system horsepower, diskspace, and something that can read your backup tapes, you're all set. Of course, you will need matching FSIOPs...

We've had problems getting web-based applications to run during our hot site tests. We're running v5r4 on 2 Mimixed 550 systems.

I thought Save/21 and Restore/21 should be enough to put everything back together! Because we don't have the time to do a full daily Option 21 (and because some backups are done from our Mimixed machine), we have to re-assemble our system from pieces of 2 machines (although OS, PTFs, Compilers, WebQuery, WebSphere, HTTP, and JAVA are from the 'master' system). We do a monthly Option 22 backup, plus daily backups of libraries and IFS.

Normal 'library-based' applications seem to work OK with Save/Restore using SAV/RSTLIB commands.

I know that Web Sphere does NOT work with Save/Restore option 22 (or 21)! IBM sez they'll note this in a future PTF... Anything web-related seems to be problematic. Our problems were worse with WebSphere, HTTP, and JAVA.

Our procedure for our disaster recovery tests will now be:

1) Restore everything from a GO SAVE Option 22. This includes IPLing from CD #1, then loading microcode and everything else from tape. It is important that microcode is loaded from tape-- you need to include all customized PTFs &c.

"The use of the optical media in the recovery was due to the tape drive not being configured as an alt-IPL device"- but there is an option (in the backup/recovery guide) in the section "restoring to new and different hardware" (or something like that) to let you IPL from the CD, then do everything else from a tape (including loading microcode).

2) Restore everything else (including all of the IFS). During our test we eventually did this in restricted state-- it didn't seem to take much longer than firing up enough subsystems to run 2 or more threads.

3) Delete 5733w60 (WebSphere) from the system

4) Install 5733w60 (WebSphere) from the distribution CDs. The delete/install left our applications alone during our tests... BE CAREFUL!

5) Install PTFs for HTTP, JAVA, and W60 (GO PTF Option 8)

6) IPL (And make sure -all- of the PTFs apply-- we were IPLing in 'attended' mode, and it ignores any 'apply PTF' settings made during GO PTF. Ask me how I know!)

7) Run the WebSphere Updater, specifying Java -devkit14... we have multiple versions of Java on our machines, and the updater is fussy about which version it likes to run under!

In QSHell /qibm/proddata/websphere/appserver/v6/base/updateinstaller/update -devkit14

8) Fire up everything

My current thoughts are to keep the latest 'W60 CD and PTFs in Image Catalogs in the IFS, so they're always available from our backup tapes.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx