| Server Cloning using Symantec LiveState Recovery |
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| Written by Richard Thompson, Monday, 09 October 2006 | |
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This past week my Citrix farm suffered 2 servers crashing from what looked like malicious damage to the server and using a product by Symantec called Live State Recovery we were able to recover both servers in under 2 hours. As a result of this I thought I would write a How to as well as a review on the product. So here is the situation, you have a fairly large Citrix farm and a server fails. Your servers are pooled with certain servers hosting certain applications. . Start by installing Symantec Live State recovery onto the Citrix server which you would like to clone. Creating the recovery point Once the console is installed and you have activated your license code launch the application. Being a System Administrator the first thing I do is click Advanced view in Task pane on the top right hand side of the screen. Right click on the System drive and select Create Recovery Point A Welcome to the Create Recovery Point Wizard will then come up. It only really gives you 2 options, Next and Cancel! No prizes for guessing which the correct option is.You will then be prompted to select the drives which you would like to include in the recovery points. As a rule I install all my applications onto the servers C Drive and then the D Drive is reserved for page files and my temp files. Using my configuration I simply select the C Drive and click next, however you can select as many drives as you need. You are then prompted to type a location for the recovery point to be saved to. Your location will need to have more free space available than the amount of used space on your source drive. In this case I am using a local drive (E:) to save the image to and I name them by month. Generally speaking your Citrix Server will not change all that often. Personally I like to create an image after completely installing and testing my first server in a farm and then just loading this image on all subsequent machines. It is also extremely beneficial to make a restore point before installing any Software or making a system change. It takes around 10 – 15 minutes to make the image and can save you several hours if an application takes your server down. You can save the image to a network share, unc path or a local drive. If you use a network location be sure to enter valid network credentials into the network credentials dialogue box. Next you will see compression options. Compressing your restore point can save some space, BUT you must remember it will take a little longer to make the restore point as well as a little longer to restore this because of compressing and decompressing the image. Storage is one thing that we can get our hands on pretty cheaply these days so I would recommend leaving this setting on Standard. The option to verify the recovery point is available at this time. Verifying the recovery point is a handy way of ensuring your recovery point is a good, error free recovery point. This option does cause the creation of the recovery point to take a little longer than without however if it is a scheduled task or one which you are deploying a new farm it is worth doing. You will notice an advanced button, this gives you the option to password protect your recovery point, divide it into smaller pieces, ignore bad sectors and disable smart sector copying. For most cases you will leave this as is without modifying any options The next screen give you options to run command files during the process. Personally I’ve never used these command files before but I am sure they can be pretty useful. Clicking Finish will start the Creation of the recovery point, you will see the following Progress and Performance window appear. In the case of a new farm you will want to set the performance to fast because you wont have people logged on and working on your server. If a server has gone down and you need to recover by taking an image and restoring or before replacing a hard disk or other online maintenance you will most likely want to drop the performance down a little so that your end users don’t notice a slow down in performance and start calling to complain. This is done by simply moving the Performance bar left or right. Restoring the recovery pointInsert the bootable Symantec LiveState Recovery disk into the servers CD Rom drive and restart the server. When prompted to Press any key to boot from CD Rom, Press any key. You will notice a screen similar to the initial Windows screen which reads Starting Symantec Recovery Disk. On certain systems this may appear to hang, this is normal and you should just leave it as eventually it will boot correctly. You will then be prompted with a License Agreement screen. Read the license agreement and then click Accept to proceed. A prompt will then appear asking whether you would like network support or not. If you do not select anything after 10 seconds LiveState Recovery will automatically enable networking support. Personally I always enable networking support because you can map network drives, verify connectivity to other systems, etc. If your Image is located on the network you need to follow the following steps:
Click on the Recover option from the Task List on the left hand side of the screen. You will be given 2 options for recovery. Either Recover drives or recover files and folders. For the most part you will be recovering drives because quite often your initial image will not have been created on the system you are recovering and recovering system files to a different server is not always a very good idea. For the purpose of this document which is aimed at imaging a server we are going to select to recover drives. You are now prompted with 3 more options. These options are Recover a single drive, Recover Multiple Drives and Recover Multiple Drives using an index. Ultimately the second and third options do the same thing with the latter being a little quicker as it can use the index file. For the most part you will only be looking to restore your system drive, in which case you will select Recovery single drive. The next screen will present an option to select a recovery point. Click Browse and browse to the location which you saved your recovery point to. Here you can chose local drives or mapped network drives using the drop down boxes. Click on the v2i file and click open. You will then be returned to the Recovery point to restore window. The list box underneath the text box will display various bits of information about the recovery point. The next window you see will be the recovery destination window. Select the destination drive to restore to. You are now presented with a variety of recovery options. The options are discussed hereafter.
You are not presented with a summary screen. Review your selections now and make sure you are 100% sure you have selected everything correctly. For the purpose of this document we are restoring this image to a different server so my next advice is really important, DO NOT SELECT Reboot when finished. Your restore will now complete. Once your restore has completed and the server is waiting to be rebooted unplug all network cables. Failing to do this will result in duplicate names and IP Addresses appearing on your network which may cause users on the original image server to be disconnected. Once you machine has rebooted and you are logged on to Windows using an account with administrative privileges. Launch a command prompt window and type sysprep. A warning dialogue will be displayed explaining that running sysprep can modify your system security. A system preparation application will then appear, select the option to Reseal which will cause the system to be reconfigure, this includes regenerating a new SID, changing system names and IP addresses, etc. Change the shutdown mode to reboot and click OK. You will then be notified that you have chosen to regenerate security identifiers on the next reboot. You will see a block on screen saying Sysprep is working. This will take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes based on the speed of the server. The server will then reboot automatically. You will then see something similar to the standard Windows setup wizard. Ensure you change the name of the server as well as set the correct IP Addresses. You will also be prompted to enter a new admin password. Once this process completes you can plug your network cables back in. You may receive an error preventing you from logging on to an Active Directory domain. Verify that the servers computer account is enabled. In most cases this will be disabled and you will simply need to right click on the account and select Enable account. If you still have a problem after enabling the account simply disjoin the server from the domain and rejoin this to the domain. You will now have a fully functional server which was restored from an image in around 20 minutes. This action was performed using Symantec LiveState Recovery 6.5. Note: Datacrash.net cannot be held responsible for any damage caused to servers as a result of server imaging. |
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