Re: BRMS recovery

[Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,

It's great that you are testing!  Congratulations for that since many 
shops figure they have a good back up, why test the recovery, and you 
have very well described why in a very short note.

The time to recover the disk configuration, load LIC, the OS and LPPs  
are all going to be the same under BRMS or IBM i direct commands.  BRMS 
will add about 3% or 4% to a recovery of the applications since it has 
to update its database along the way, but that's reasonably minor.

It should take about two more tries before you have your save process 
set up to support your intended recovery plan.  (At least that's the 
average I've run into)   Keep in mind, if you use the *SAVSYS group or 
one just like it for your full system saves, you can still use the 
native IBM restore commands to recover the system, and not use BRMS, to 
do the recovery.  Not my first choice but possible.  Just use the 
correct sequence, LIC/OS, *IBM, *ALLUSR, (repeat as needed for iASPs) 
*LINK (repeat as needed for iASP) and finally DLO.  You can avoid the 
BRMS overhead in that case and get the exact same results as you would 
from a BRMS recovery, or a "21" save.  You can even change the program 
behind the option 21 on the RESTORE menu to run the commands the way you 
want them if you wish.

I don't suspect a restore without BRMS will be that much faster.  
Frankly as our systems have grown, we have not kept up our expectations 
about the recoveries to go with them.  A bigger system takes longer to 
restore and most have not though about that part.

You say you had to both initialize the disk and reintialize them when 
you added them to the ASP (*SYSBAS ?).  Since the RAID controller did 
not change out DASD Units, that implies something went wrong there, you 
should not have needed two initialization routines.  Where the DASD 
units marked read only (DPH00x) ?

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 4/21/2013 6:46 PM, Steinmetz, Paul wrote:
> I've just completed a BRMS test recovery of a V6R1 R&D partition  to a test partition, many issues, (many objects, links, and authorities not restored) need to be reviewed and resolved.
> Recovery took 4 days.
> Recovery was from system save, month end full save, and daily incrementals.
> 12 hours to init disks, 12 hours to add to ASP, LIC 1 hour, 5 hours i5 OS, user data - 2 days plus.
> Previously I've done restore 21, with good success.
> BRMS does an excellent job for saves, application restores, but I am really questioning a total recovery.
> Has anyone done a BRMS recovery in a reasonable time with minimal errors?
> I'm not sure I could ever recover using a BRMS recovery.
>
> Paul Steinmetz
> IBM i Systems Administrator
>
> Pencor Services, Inc.
> 471 Delaware Ave
> Palmerton Pa 18071
>
> 610-826-9117 work
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> http://www.pencor.com/
> --