48 Hour Work Night? Follow-up
After my recent post about our 48 hour work night Matthew Irvine asked what was the ‘Plan B’ I mentioned. I have to admit we didn’t have a pre formulated ‘Plan B’. When we realized that the recovery of the backup to a new virtual disk wasn’t going to work we put things back as they were and stopped the SAN expansion so we could go home and sleep on our problem. Jeremie remounted the iSCSI volume and we left the file server in its original state.
Now for the later contrived ‘Plan B’, we used DFSR (Distributed File System Replication) to replicate the entire file server’s iSCSI drive (drive e:) to another new clean and healthy file server.
Note that the R2 variety of DFS is much much better in what it can do and how it is configured. DFSR actually allows for file replication without the creation of a Namespace first and the replication is much better that the previous version. (From what I have read and Chris Green tells me).
Installing DFSR requires R2 being installed, and in our case the file server required us to install DFSR from the W2k3 R2 disk 2. Even after the install our file server didn’t display the management console, but lucky for us you don’t have to have the management console functional on both servers to replicate the data. After we installed DFSR on the new server we were able to set up a job to replicate both servers.
So our ‘Plan B’ is currently to use the newly replicated file server as our primary server while we work thru the expansion of the SAN. One great feature with DFSR is that it not only replicated the files but also the permissions (albeit the permissions we inherited from years of previous use and we will be cleaning up the permissions mess in the future weeks). Our plan is to remove the replication job, power down and decommission the old file server and name the new file server with the same name. We have decided to keep the same server name because our laptop users use offline synchronization and changing the server name is easier than reconfiguring the offline sync configurations on each laptop.
After our SAN is in its newly grown state we can replicate the files back to the SAN from the virtual disk with the same process all within the same Virtual server….
One interesting feature we must research a bit more is using a namespace for the file server… maybe DFSR is a potential topic for Chris Green to ‘present’ during a future CITRT Podcast.
That’s the plan, and maybe we’ll stick to it.