What is your backup and disaster recovery plan?

[newtobes]

Given that Zimbra does not offer any disaster recovery plan/option at this time, what sort of backup and fail-over/disaster recovery plan have you implemented/tested?

We're investigating and testing available options and it would be really be helpful to hear what others are doing. Has anyone implemented a virtualized environment? If yes, we would love to hear your experiences as well.

I submitted a Zimbra support case requesting some sort of mechanism/option for fail-over/disaster recovery. In turn, they have created an "enhancement request" which can be found located here: Bug 40297 – Backup Recovery & Failover Mechanism for ZCB

[Dirk]

This pretty much covers it for us

[newtobes]

Haha.

The disaster recovery plan we're testing/investigating is backing up everything (O/S, database, Outlook profiles) using Netbackup. In the event one of the servers go down we would failover to a virtual machine using P2V until we get another box configured and restore everything from backup and manually restore the database.

Has anyone tried this? I'm a bit skeptical that even if everything is restored that there would be connectivity between BES and the device or if a re-activation is required. This would be painful if you have 20+ users.

[eugener]

This article maybe helpful:

View Document

[newtobes]

Update: We deleted a test user's .zdb and were able to successfully restore it and it started synchronizing without re-activation.


We wanted to test deleting the user from the database so we deleted them from BB manager and then restored the database. Unfortunately a re-activation was required. We also noticed that a new .zdb file was created.

Zimbra Staff: What files are deleted when removing a user from the BB manager? Maybe we didn't restore all the necessary files.


We will also be testing P2V soon - however it's really hard to test these scenarios since our test server has 3 users and whereas our production servers will have 50+ each.

[eugener]

>Zimbra Staff: What files are deleted when removing a user from the BB
>manager? Maybe we didn't restore all the necessary files.

Deletion of user in BB manager leads to deletion of corresponding delegate mailstore in 'BlackBerryServer' profile. That is why the proper test case here may be:

- backup BES DB
- backup mail profiles info from registry key
[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\W indows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\BlackBerryServer]
- backup zdb
- delete user using BB manager
- stop BB Controller, BB Manager
- restore BES DB
- restore above mail profiles registry key
- restore zdb
- start BB Controller, BB Manager

[eugener]

small correction:

'stop BB controller, BB Manager' step has to be the first step in sequence above and not in the middle.

Thanks.

[newtobes]

Originally Posted by eugener

>Zimbra Staff: What files are deleted when removing a user from the BB
>manager? Maybe we didn't restore all the necessary files.

Deletion of user in BB manager leads to deletion of corresponding delegate mailstore in 'BlackBerryServer' profile. That is why the proper test case here may be:

- backup BES DB
- backup mail profiles info from registry key
[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\W indows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\BlackBerryServer]
- backup zdb
- delete user using BB manager
- stop BB Controller, BB Manager
- restore BES DB
- restore above mail profiles registry key
- restore zdb
- start BB Controller, BB Manager

Thanks Eugene, that's actually what we tried earlier this afternoon. We pretty much did everything you listed but we restored in the following sequence: zdb, registry and database, then rebooted and everything came backup. The way our backups are, we can only restore the whole registry.

We have 3 users and unfortunately we weren't patient enough and started the re-activation of 2 but the 3rd one starting receiving messages without re-activation. We're going to run through this again and see if all 3 users can start synchronizing without re-activation.

Do you have any experience with P2V - any words of wisdom you can impart? Because we're hot cloning we'll be unable to sync the database so we're thinking that once it fails over to the virtual machine, we would run the restore as described from the latest backup. That's pretty much our disaster recovery plan.

We're also going to test out the failover to a physical machine.

[eugener]

>Do you have any experience with P2V - any words of wisdom you can impart?

Sorry.. never used it and unfortunately cannot give you advice on this.

[newtobes]

Eugene, question about backing up and restoring the registry keys. How do you go about doing this?

We're using Netbackup to backup the registry but it's unable restore the keys. We're thinking maybe we have to write a script to export the keys to a file and then backup that up.