Re: Need Help with VIOS backupios Cmd

Thanks Sue.. IBM finally found someone ( In Poland ) that had an idea as to
what was going on. It appears backupios needs LOTS and LOTS of space in
/home/padmin and in /tmp. He me increase the allocated space for each by
10GB. While the backupios ran longer it still failed. So I increased both
locations by another 10GB each. That allowed the backupios cmd to run
without an error.

My goal in all this was to get a backup(s) that I could remotely
rebuild/recover my VIOS if the scheduled updates to VIOS went bad and I
wanted it to go to tape. I had Save 21's of all my IBM i partitions so I
was hoping if need be I could
Restore from the backupios tape,
Restore from viosbr ( if needed )
Rebuild my logical volumes ( if need be )
Restore my IBM i partitions from their Save 21's ( if needed ).

Long story short.. updates went on fine





On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:22 AM, Sue Baker <smbaker@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/22/2012 1:20 PM, Kirk Goins wrote:

OK I'm coming to the experts here since I can't seem to get the help I

need

from IBM today...

I'm only guessing here because I do not attempt to backup the VIOS
environment.

The mapping for virtual SCSI devices is not backed up with the backupios
command. This may be what the error messages mean. Or, because the
IBM_i volume group is large, there is some construct that backupios
cannot create on tape (maximum 2TB related?) and thus the errors?

I'm guessing with the backupios, you don't really want to save your IBM
i information, but instead you want to save the IBM_i volume group and
the vSCSI mapping information, right? To backup the mappings, use the
command
viosbr -backup -file xxxxxxxx
replacing xxxxxx with a name meaningful to you. The resulting tar.gz
file will contain almost all the information needed to recreate the
vSCSI mappings for the client LPARs.

To get the backup to complete without errors, I believe you'll need to
have the command be

backupios -tape /dev/rmt0 -nosvg

Note: see

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/powersys/v3r1m5/topic/p7hcgl/backupios.htm
for additional parameters that can be added to the command to exclude
virtual media repository or save to file instead of tape.

Run viosbr first, then backupios. This should put everything you need
for the VIOS LPAR on tape. To recover, you restore from the tape then run
viosbr -restore -file xxxxxxxx
At this point, you're ready to start restoring client LPARs.

FYI. I FTP the file from the viosbr command to multiple machines. My
disaster recovery plan for VIOS is to grab the current level install
media for VIOS and then download any device drivers needed (usually the
multipath for SAN device specific stuff). Use the viosbr -restore
command to recover mappings. Then begin restore from tape of each client.

--
Sue Baker
IBM Americas ATS - Power Systems
Rochester, MN
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