To protect Linux clients, burn a bare metal .iso image to CD and run periodic master backups. For disaster recovery, boot from the CD, then restore the master backup followed by any differential and/or incremental backups. The most common situation necessitating a bare metal restore is when the entire file system on the Linux client has crashed and cannot be recovered with the fsck command, but the system can be booted from the hard drive.
Keep the following criteria in mind when planning for Linux disaster recovery:
• For a list of supported Linux distributions, see the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix.
• A valid Master Backup of the client must be performed before restoring from the boot CD.
• Linux bare metal protection does not support backups with inclusion lists.
• File systems cannot be removed from the configuration.
• Disks cannot be partitioned manually.
• Root disks cannot be changed.
• Linux hot bare metal protection does not support full disk encryption.
• The system must be restored to disks which are the same size or larger than the original disks.
• You are responsible for booting the system and the availability of the bare metal media.
• The computer can boot from the bare metal CD.
• For Linux platforms, you can run a cold bare metal if desired. For GPT-partitioned Ubuntu 12.04 systems, you must back up the entire disk as described in Performing cold bare metal backups and restores.
• Test the bare metal CD when created to make sure that it will work at the time of restore.
• The bare metal media for the server cannot be created after the system has crashed.
• The server must use the default service port of 1743. This is because the client may not be able to modify its services file (/etc/services) when booted from the alternate boot media.
• Linux bare metal software will work correctly only if the client has GRUB boot loader as the default. LILO boot loader is not supported.
• For VMware guests running Linux that were backed up at the GOS level, the VM must be configured to use the E1000 network adapter and its SCSI controller must use LSI parallel logic. Bare metal restore is not supported on Linux VMs using the VMXNET 3 adapter or whose SCSI controller uses VMware paravirtual. It is recommended to run backups at the host level rather than at the agent level.
• For clients with a default network adapter with a name other than eth0, you might need to edit the configuration file when creating the bare metal media. For details, see KB 1602.
• Dissimilar bare metal restores are not supported for Linux clients.
The premise of bare metal protection is to create a Linux bare metal boot disk, which contains programs, utilities, and system-specific information. This disk can be used to aid in recovery of a crashed system. The crashed system is booted using the bare metal disk to begin the restore process.
Bare metal restores the entire system from a selected master backup. All disks present in the system configuration during creation of the bare metal media are configured and used for restoring data.