EMC has a very nice, and very expensive piece of software called Replication Manager. Replication Manager is basically a giant scheduler that helps you create storage clone and snapshots on a regular schedule. Pretty much everything that it does, can be handled via batch files if you have the time to get everything written the way you want. Replication Manager simply gives you an easy interface to set this stuff up in, and it’ll email you on failures, that sort of stuff.
Now the product works very well (as well it should for what it costs), but I recently had to reinstall it. The reason for the reinstall is that the machine that it was installed on was a Windows 2003 x86 machine, and the reason for keeping it as Windows 2003 was gone, so I decided to upgrade it to Windows 2008 x64. Because I was moving from x86 to x64 a full format was needed taking upgrading out of the picture. I also wanted to increase the size of the C drive from 20 Gigs to 50 Gigs, so a format was going to be needed anyway.
So being a DBA I backed up the data folder under c:Program FilesEMCrmserverdb and wiped the machine and got the new OS up and running. I reinstalled Replication Manager and dropped the data folder back where I got it from. But this time the services failed to fire up. It basically told me that files were missing. So I put the old files back and started the services. They started up this time. Apparently the folder c:Program FilesEMCrmserverdblog is also important as those appear to be the transaction log for the database, not just the normal log files. (I opened the file in notepad and it was in binary.) To safely backup all of everything, I’d recommend grabbing everything just to be safe.
Now the next problem I ran across was when my job ran which mounts the clone to another server. Since there was already a LUN there with that drive letter Replication Manager failed the job because it didn’t know what to do as it wasn’t in control of the drive that was mounted. Even though the LUN was mounted by the old RM server, because the new RM server didn’t know about the old job it didn’t know that it could safely remove the LUN from the server and present the new clone.
So I guess the big piece of this to remember is that if you have to rebuild your Replication Manager server, you’ll need to go to all your machines which you have presented the clone or snapshots to, and manually remove them from those servers so that Replication Manager can post those LUNs to the destinations correctly.
Denny
