Linux bare metal protection and recovery

???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.???

 

There are two options for disaster recovery of Linux assets: hot bare metal recovery (BMR) and cold BMR.

For most Linux assets, you can use hot BMR, which is the recommended method. With hot BMR, you create a bootable ISO for the asset from its full backup. The ISO contains programs, utilities, and other system-specific information. If the asset fails, you recover the asset to identical hardware or ??to a similar virtual machine?? by booting from this ISO and performing BMR of the failed asset's full backup. This recovers the operating system and the files in the full backup to the new machine. After performing hot BMR, you can recover subsequent asset-level backups to capture any changes since the recovered full backup ran.

If hot BMR is not supported for your Linux asset, use cold BMR instead. With cold BMR, you create a bootable ISO for the asset, and then boot from this ISO to perform a block-level cold bare metal backup of the asset's boot disk, which is saved to the backup appliance. If the asset fails, you recover its operating system to identical hardware or ??to a similar virtual machine?? by booting from this ISO and recovering the cold bare metal backup. After performing cold BMR, you recover the latest asset-level backups to restore directories and files.

Note:  If you have Linux virtual machines, you can protect them by running host-level backups that use hypervisor snapshots or by installing the Linux agent and running asset-level backups. If you are running agent-based asset-level backups for a VM, use the bare metal procedures in this chapter for disaster recovery. If you are running host-level backups for a VM, see Recovering a virtual machine.

To set up bare metal protection, see the following topics:

Windows unified bare metal recovery
Windows image-based bare metal recovery