This is a another successful job I complete recently which I wanted to share with you all. The scenario is to move an production application service from a desktop PC to a new server with minimal impact to the production environment.
The desktop has been running Latest Anti virus Management service in it with windows 2003 server OS and serving nearly 1000 clients PC's. Everything running smoothly until we hit the idea of this was running in a standard desktop PC.
So we brought a new IDM server with a Xeon processor and a Raid 0 build. Our main task has been moving the AV server database and the roles from the production PC to the server but not doing any installation at the client PC's. Client PC's' has been distributed around the country and hence doing any modification to all of them would take months time which we dare even to dream. So we came up the idea of testing this with one of the software offered by Symantec called as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery.
First we install the software the production server and ran the Liveupdate to make sure it get the latest software updates to the particular software. After that we had to register the product. Registration is necessary if you're doing a migration for dissimilar hardware which is true in our case. Ran the disk cleanup and in house cleaning for prior to the image creation. After that using the BESR we created and image of the C partion in a network drive.
Now the part of moving the image to the new server. Before that according to the Symantec information we created a custom bootable recovery CD. This CD has a database of most hardware device drivers you can find in the market. Boot the new server with the BESR recovery CD and once boot we are been welcome to a VISTA PE environment and asking the question to star the network services. Since we have our image created in a network share we wanted to start the network service in the new server. Assign a static IP to the new server and then we map the network which contains the image. Once that completed in the main page we had the option to select to recover my computer and then give the path to the image file. Once the image has been identified we have to go through several screen requesting how we want to restore the image, one important option is to select we're doing a restore to a different hardware. Apart from that you get the chance of changing the partion size, verify the image after restoration, restore the MBR...etc. Once those options has been adjusted it matter about the time it take to restore the image from the network to the target machine. Restoration time will be entirely depend on the network or the hardware equipment. If you have copied the image to a external removable media and trying to restore it from there this process will be much more quicker. For the above process it took 25 minutes to restore 30GB image over the network. Assuming if you had gigabit network or less traffic in that network the time will be reduced dramatically.
Once the restoration is completed target server restarted and went through the process of detecting the new HAL components. The only time it stops is for requesting the raid controller driver which we provided from the network location path itself which we have copied earlier. Once the process is completed we had to add the server to the domain. Entire process took around 1.5 hours and the new serer is up and running to server the clients!!
As you can imagine this is real time save to move old servers to new servers without a sweat. We've been using this tool to convert our live servers to virtual environment then virtualizes all the servers as well. If you have specific questions you can PM me or alternatively you can meet me via
MSN susanthasilva@hotmail.com
I've provide few links below which describe about the above mention software,
http://www.symantec.com/business/products/family.jsp?familyid=backupexec
http://techcenter.symantec.com/ecampus/enterprise?siteName=sena&courseNo=DP6000
