Backing up and restoring HP Insight Management 7.3 Central Management Server (Windows)

Technical white paper | HP Insight Management 7.3
This configuration is also referred to as an infrastructure orchestration federated CMS. Backups and restores of CMSs in a
federated CMS are not required to be synchronized. If one CMS in the federated CMS fails, it can be recovered by a restore
from backup. It is not necessary to restore the other CMSs in the federated CMS.
HP Insight Management can also be configured for high availability using Microsoft Failover Cluster. In a typical
configuration, two servers, as cluster members, are configured to run HP Insight Management, although it runs on only one
server at a time. One server acts as the primary node; the second server acts as the secondary node. The secondary node is
available to host the CMS in the event of a failure on the primary node. In this configuration, the HP Insight Management
software programs and data files are located on a shared disk that can be used by either node. If the HP Insight
Management database is configured in the same cluster, it will be located on a separate shared disk. This configuration is
also referred to as an HA CMS cluster configuration. The primary node will be used to refer to the cluster server node
currently hosting the HP Insight Management cluster service, and the secondary node will be used to refer to the alternate
server. A full backup of an HA CMS includes full system backups of each cluster node and all shared disks.
The procedures in this white paper also cover HP Matrix infrastructure orchestration federated CMS environments
configured with Microsoft Failover Cluster.
For more information about these configurations, see the following documents:
• Installing and Upgrading to HP Insight Management 7.3 on Windows Server 2012 Failover Clusters, available at
http://www.hp.com/go/insightmanagement/docs
• HP Matrix Operating Environment Federated CMS Overview, available at http://www.hp.com/go/matrixoe/docs
Preparing your environment for backup
If the HP Insight Management CMS environment has been lost or corrupted, you may need to restore your CMS from a
backup copy. HP recommends performing a full system backup periodically. A partial backup can be performed between full
system backups. Saving your environment describes the steps to perform a full system backup or a backup of only the HP
Insight Management files, directories, and databases that contain user-changeable state and configuration data. To restore
a partial backup successfully, the CMS must be running the same version of the software that was running when the full
system backup was performed. A full system backup should be performed whenever the software on the CMS is updated.
Notes:
• HP does not require the backup and restore of the HP Insight Management CMS to be synchronized with the backup
and restore of other management tools in the data center. Although the backup and restore of the HP Insight
Management components should be synchronized, they can be done independently of the backup and restore of other
management tools such as VMware vCenter and HP Virtual Connect Manager. In HP Matrix infrastructure orchestration
federated CMS configurations, backups and restores of the primary and secondary CMSs are independent.
• HP recommends performing backups of other management components in a Matrix solution, including Onboard
Administrators, Virtual Connect Managers, and SAN switches. Although these components do not change often, they
should be backed up when configuration changes occur. HP recommends that you back up these components when
the CMS is not being used, such as during a CMS backup when the HP Insight Management services are down.
To create a valid backup of your CMS, all running jobs and tasks must complete before stopping the HP Insight Management
services. To prepare your environment for backup:
1. For federated CMS environments, an extra step is required to prepare a secondary CMS for backup. You must quiesce
the operations on the primary CMS that are targeted at the secondary CMS you are backing up. This will allow
infrastructure orchestration on the primary CMS to continue running while a secondary CMS is backed up.
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