Replibit - How to perform Bare Metal Recovery in Replibit

Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) is the process of restoring a protected system directly back onto a newly repaired or replaced hardware system. 

Note: You can also perform a bare metal recovery onto virtual systems.  In most cases, this is the fastest method of recovering a protected system completely from backup.

With bare metal recovery, (as the name implies), there is no need to first load an operating system before beginning the recovery.  Using the Replibit Restore Wizard, you can simply write the protected system image directly back to the recovered system. 

The following instructions may be used to recover your protected system back onto either a bare metal server or virtual machine using the Replibit Recovery Toolkit. (This is a quick overview of the Bare Metal Restore process.  For complete documentation of all features of the Recovery Toolkit, refer to the Replibit Recovery Toolkit Guide.)

Minimum System Requirements

• 1GB RAM
• 1Ghz CPU
• Bootable DVD or USB Support

BMR Limitations and Unsupported Configurations

The Replibit Recovery Toolkit operates from a Linux environment and there are several unsupported recovery scenarios: 

• BMR recovery cannot be performed onto any hardware platform that requires Windows-only drivers. Examples of this would be any system using an unsupported motherboard RAID adapter. (Dell PERC S3xx series, Intel Cxxx controllers, and HP SmartArray B120/B320, as well as most white-box motherboard RAID controllers are examples of unsupported adapters)
• The Recovery Wizard cannot recover systems with multiple Windows volumes on a single physical disk. (e.g. C: and E: on Disk 0). If it is necessary to perform a recovery of multiple volumes onto a single disk, refer to the Manual Partition Recovery section of the Replibit Recovery Toolkit Guide.
• The size of any partition or volume cannot be changed before or during the recovery process. Therefore, the new Destination disk *MUST* be at least as large or larger than the original disk.

It is highly recommended that you perform test BMR restores of your customer systems to become familiar with both the recovery process and limitations to ensure you are prepared in the event of a real disaster.

Boot the Replibit Recovery Toolkit

1. Download the Axcient Replibit Recovery Toolkit from Axcient Replibit.
2. Burn the ISO to a DVD or create a bootable USB image
3. Boot your destination physical or virtual system from the Recovery ISO.
4. Click the Recovery Wizard icon to launch the Replibit Recovery Wizard.

5. In the Replibit Server Connection screen, enter information about the Vault or Appliance:

• In the IP Address field, enter the Vault or Appliance IP address, or FQDN.
• In the Username field, enter the Username (Admin on an Appliance, or the customer account on a Vault).
• In the Password field, enter the Password.

Click the Next button to continue.


6. In the Protected System Selection screen, select the Protected System that should be recovered:

• From the Chose Protected System to restore drop-down box, select the Protected System you would like to recover.
• In the Choose Snapshot to Restore section, select from the following options:
  • From a list of recent snapshots
  • From a specific date

Click Next to continue.


7. In the Snapshot Selection screen, select the Snapshot that should be used as the recovery point:

• Select the recovery point date and time that you would like to use for recovery of the Protected System.
• If an Encryption Passphrase was configured when the Agent was installed on this Protected System, enter the Encryption password.
• Click Next to continue.
  
  

8. The Recovery Wizard will now initialize iSCSI services, export the selected recovery point on the Appliance or Vault, and attach the disk volumes.

9. The progress window should show Finished when successful. Click Next to continue.

10. In the Drive Mapping screen, select the drive volume(s) you wish to recover:

• Select the checkboxes next to the appropriate drive volumes.
• For each volume being recovered, choose a disk to restore it to by selecting from the dropdown list.
• Click Next to continue.
  
  
  
  The recovery data copy process will begin. Monitor the overall job progress from the Recovery Wizard status window. Detailed job information is presented in the main window.  Job status and estimated time remaining are shown at the bottom.
  
  
  
  

11. When the recovery process is complete, click the Finish button.

12. Reboot the system immediately; or if you are restoring to a system with dissimilar hardware, please proceed to Dissimilar Hardware Driver Injection section listed below.

Dissimilar Hardware Driver Injection

If recovering to a Bare Metal system, it is likely that the new hardware is substantially different from the original machine and the recovered system will need to have drivers installed for the new devices.

Perform the following steps to inject drivers into the offline system *AFTER* performing the recovery, but  *PRIOR* to booting it for the first time from the recovered image:

1. Mount the volume containing the C: drive of the Protected System using Disk Manager.
   
   
   
   

From the Recovery Tools menu, click to launch the Driver Injector.



The Replibit BMR Driver Injector screen displays.

Note: If you have not mounted a disk volume that contains a valid Windows installation folder, you will receive a warning that the Driver Injector could not locate the offline Windows installation. 


3. Configure target settings:

• The Dropdown selector Offline Windows Operating System should automatically discover the mounted system. If not, make sure the volume containing the C: drive is mounted and click Refresh.
• Click browse and select the location containing the Windows drivers you would like to install.  To use the basic set of Windows drivers that has been included on the Recovery ISO, select the /root/Windows-Drivers
• If you would also like to scan the native Windows driver library on the recovered system, click to select Also Scan the System32\DriverStore\FileRepository Directory for Drivers.
• You can leave all other settings at their default values.
• Click Next to continue.
  
  

4. In the next screen, wait for the Driver Injector to read through the provided driver files, and make matches against the hardware installed within the running system. Click the Next button to continue.

5.  In the next screen, verify that the driver matches have been located for all critical hardware, such as storage controllers. 

• To manually add specific drivers into the offline Windows installation, regardless of whether or not the hardware is physically present on the running system, click Add Drivers.
• From the Add Drivers dialog box, click Add and browse to the .inf driver file you would like to add.  Repeat as necessary to add additional drivers.
  
  
  
  Note: No validation is performed on the drivers being selected. Please ensure that you are selecting a valid Windows driver file for the correct operating system and architecture.
  
  
• When you are finished adding drivers, click the Close button.
• Click the Next button to continue. 

6. The previously discovered and manually selected drivers will now be installed. Click Finish when the installation process has completed.

IMPORTANT: After performing a full system recovery or virtualizing a system in Live Mode, Replibit will automatically perform a new Full Backup at the next scheduled time in order to synchronize the recovered system with the backup image.  This Full Backup will only write changed data, but it is essential to ensure that the Backup image remains in sync with the Protected System.