R.E.A.R. – Relax and Recover

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Relax-and-Recover has a few interesting characteristics you may find useful when assessing it as a Disaster Recovery solution:

  • Modular design, written in Bash
    • easy to extend with custom functionality
    • targeted at sysadmins foremost
  • Set up and forget nature
    • designed to be easy to setup
    • designed to require no maintenance (e.g. cron integration, nagios monitoring)
  • Recovery image based on original distribution with original tools
    • recovery process remains compatible with original system and applications
    • hardware support is guaranteed
  • Two-step recovery, with optional guided menus
    • disaster recovery process targeted at operational teams
    • migration process offers flexibility and control
  • Bare metal recovery on dissimilar hardware
    • support for physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-physical (V2P)
    • support for physical-to-physical (P2P) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V)
    • various virtualization technologies supported (KVM, Xen, VMware)
  • Support for various integrated boot media types, incl.
    • ISO
    • USB
    • eSATA
    • OBDR/bootable tape
    • PXE
  • Support for various transport methods, incl.
    • HTTP
    • HTTPS
    • FTP
    • SFTP
    • NFS
    • CIFS (SMB)
  • Extensive disk layout implementation, incl.
    • HWRAID (HP SmartArray)
    • SWRAID
    • LVM
    • multipathing
    • DRBD
    • iSCSI
    • LUKS (encrypted partitions and filesystems)
  • Supports various 3rd party backup technologies, incl.
  • Supports various internal backup methods
  • Two phase disk layout recovery, allows reconfiguration before recovery, e.g.
    • migrations from e.g. SWRAID to HWRAID, or unencryped to encrypted partitions
    • HWRAID reconfigurations
    • migration from partitions to LVM
  • Various techniques to help troubleshooting
    • structured log files and guided menus
    • log files are moved to recovery image, and to recovered system (available in every step for debugging)
    • advanced debugging options to help trace scripts or develop new functionality
  • Integration with monitoring (examples for Nagios/Opsview)
  • Integration with scheduler (e.g. let cron recreate and transfer your images upon disk layout changes)
  • Various best practices to assist recovery
    • integrates with local bootloader (in case it is still possible, you can restore from local disk through Grub)
    • automatic network and ssh configuration (for remote recovery)
    • automatic serial console support (useful for recovery through iLO or KVM serial console)
    • shell history-stuffing (stuff shell history with useful commands at every step)
    • automatic recovery when possible, guided recovery when needed

 

Read more:

relax-and-recover.org

 

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