Considerations for testing bare metal recovery

It is recommended that you perform test bare metal recovery procedures for each of your assets. Before performing a test bare metal recovery, see the table below for special conditions you need to be aware of.

Type

Description

Network considerations

Note:  These considerations do not apply to Windows integrated bare metal recovery. See Performing a test integrated bare metal recovery instead.)

Consider the following before performing the test recovery:

When booting from a bare metal test CD, the asset will come on the network using the IP and hostname of the asset the CD was made for. When creating the bare metal boot disk for Windows assets, you have the option to manually change the IP and hostname when creating the disk. For all other asset operating systems, and for Windows assets whose bare metal boot disks’ IPs and hostnames were not changed, it’s critical that the test system not be connected to the same physical network if the original server is still online as this can cause an IP/DNS conflict.
When you boot a server or virtual machine using a bare metal boot disk, the bare metal recovery software will look in the Unitrends system’s host file to match an asset to its data. Therefore, when testing bare metal recovery it may be necessary to edit the asset’s entry in the appliance’s host file to a free IP address before booting from the bare metal media. See "To view or edit the hosts" file in the Recovery Series and Unitrends Backup Administrator Guide for details on changing the IP.

If you edit an asset's hosts file entry, you must update the entry to the original value after the bare metal recovery test is complete. Standard backup and recovery procedures for the asset cannot occur until the entry is edited back.

 

Active Directory considerations

Assets that are dependent on Active Directory for day to day functions may not function properly when recovered to a test network if a domain controller is not recovered into the test network first. If you plan to recover a domain controller with bare metals, it is extremely critical to perform this recovery into a test network.