Ghosting Servers

[Des]

Guys

Thanks for the response to the below post:-

Hi


I am an IT Administrator in a Customer Contact Centre. We have got 2
DC's onsite which are Dell Power Edge 2650's and 2 Cache Severs which
are Dell Power Edge 6650's and 1 Backup Server which is a Dell Power
Edge 1750. These all connect through a SAN. We have also recently
installed 5 Call Recording Servers which are HP ProLiant DL 360 G3's.
and they each operate with 2 SCSI RAID Disks mirrored for redundancy.
We use Symantec Norton Ghost Ver 7 and would like to take a Backup of
these Servers if possible for quicker disaster recovery purposes. My
main concern is that Ghost generically uses a Bootup Disk which
assigns
the NIC on the Server with a static IP Address in the same subnet as
the designated Ghost Server so that you can Dump an Image to this
server. If this is the case then surely this would change the already
statically assigned IP Address of the Servers and upset any Networking
Relationship that they have with other systems in our Network. My
other
concern is with compatibility with RAID. Any help on this matter would
be greatly appreciated.

Now I have been assured by various responses to this that my concerns
were unfounded as Ghost assigns IP at DOS level and will not affect
Windows assignment. Also Ghost neither "sees" or even "cares" what
hardware
is running underneath it most of the time so RAID will not have any
adverse affects on the process.

My only remaining concern is about the issue of the SAN (Storage Area
Network). On each of our servers we have assigned a SAN Volume where
the bulk of our Network Resources are located. If we ghost an image of
this server then I know this data wont be included (dont care as it is
backed up) but how will the link to this SAN Resource be affected.
Will the Luns require reconfiguring. Will there be any adverse affects
of restoring the ghosted image?

Can anybody advise on any other issues that will have to be considered
when ghosting Dell Servers?

Thanks Very Much

 

[Phillip Windell]

You posted this several weeks ago and I answered it then.

main concern is that Ghost generically uses a Bootup Disk which
assigns
the NIC on the Server with a static IP Address in the same subnet as

No it does not. It does not have to be the same subnet,...it isn't even
relavant.

the designated Ghost Server so that you can Dump an Image to this
server. If this is the case then surely this would change the already
statically assigned IP Address of the Servers

No, it does not. You're running in DOS, the OS is not running, you aren't
changing anything anywhere.

Now I have been assured by various responses to this that my concerns
were unfounded as Ghost assigns IP at DOS level and will not affect
Windows assignment. Also Ghost neither "sees" or even "cares" what
hardware is running underneath it most of the time so RAID will not have any
adverse affects on the process.

That was me.

My only remaining concern is about the issue of the SAN (Storage Area
Network). On each of our servers we have assigned a SAN Volume where
the bulk of our Network Resources are located. If we ghost an image of
this server then I know this data wont be included (dont care as it is
backed up) but how will the link to this SAN Resource be affected.
Will the Luns require reconfiguring.

Not relevant. Means nothing.

Ghost just runs in DOS, in RAM, from a floppy,...finds the HD Partitions and
duplicates/compresses them into an image file that is saved in a specified
location. It is no more complicated than that.