User manual

Cobalt RaQ XTR User Manual 263
Appendix F
Disaster Recovery with
Third-Party Software
The RaQ XTR server supports the use of third-party backup solutions for
performing disaster recovery. The supported backup solutions are:
• Knox Arkeia
• Legato NetWorker
• Veritas NetBackup
Each of these solutions requires customization to correctly recover the two
Cobalt configuration databases in the RaQ XTR (the databases in Postgres and
Cobalt Configuration Engine [CCE]). This appendix describes how disaster
recovery works on the RaQ XTR, the steps required to perform general disaster
recovery, and detailed instructions on how to customize and use each of the
specific backup solutions.
How disaster recovery works
For the RaQ XTR server, the term disaster recovery means restoring the server
after performing an OS restore operation which wipes the hard drive clean and
returns it to a factory-fresh state. This is also known as “bare-metal recovery”.
The entire RaQ XTR must be restored in order for the configuration database and
the machine configuration to be in synchronization.
For most files on the RaQ XTR server, disaster recovery is straightforward: the
files are recovered from the backup service and written to the file system.
However, the two configuration databases require additional work and the three
supported backup services must be tailored to handle these databases.
The approach used to recover the configuration databases using Knox Arkeia and
Veritas NetBackup works as follows:
Before a backup operation begins, the pre-backup script
cobalt_prebackup
creates archives of the two configuration databases in the directory
/var/cobalt/backups
.