As SharePoint evironments grow and become more widespread, business’ reliance upon the uptime of critical systems continues to grow as well. Having a rock solid backup and immediately restorable solution is paramount.

Purpose built to “Save the Day” and formerly known as Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR), Symantec has an answer – System Recovery 2011. 

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Chad Sakac, EMC Vice President, VMware Technology Alliance, explains the tight integration between EMC PowerPath/VE and VMware vSphere and points out its dramatic performance and availability potential. Learn how your infrastructure behind vSphere can meet your performance and availability requirements.

PowerPath/VE will be available in June. Pricing starts at $2,100 per physical server for new PowerPath customers and $1,430 for current customers.

It inevitably fails that I’m on-site doing SAN work or cluster work and needing to add a drive to a cluster for some reason or another – whether that be physical or virtual within VMware. 

After all the creation, alignment, formatting, LUN masking and everything else is done to prep the disk, hosts, etc.  Windows always gives me grief in that it does not recognize the drive letter I want to add in the cluster admin GUI. 

In this case, I pull out my trusty “cluster.exe” command line utility and add the disk the old fashioned way – forcefully

Example:

C:>cluster . res “Disk L:” /create /group:”Exchange Group” /type:”physical disk”

C:>cluster . res “Disk L:” /priv Drive=”L:”

Voila!  Breakfast is ready….

Here’s some interesting reading related to the Downadup virus from the SANS NewsBites newsletter. SANS is a computer security training organization (http://www.sans.org/)

–How One Company Cleaned Up The Thumb Drive Attacks- And Learned A Lot In The Process.

From the editor of SANS NewsBites: I received a fascinating note from a manager who registered three people for SANS training this winter despite a corporate ban on nearly all travel and training for the first half of 2009. I had known about his company’s ban so when I saw the three registrations come in, I wrote and asked him what happened. His answer is enlightening; it has to do with the thumb drive infections that are hitting so many people.

Here’s his answer to “Why Did You Send People to SANS This Year When You Have a Ban on Training and Travel?”

Alan,

Take a closer look; you’ll find that 12 or 13 people are coming from (company) to SANS in Orlando, not just my three. The others are coming from other divisions. Here’s why. You remember the big wave of attacks last November where infections were spread by thumb drives. We got hit by that. It is amazing how often people use those things. It spread to dozens of Windows file servers, and from there jumped to thousands of workstation systems. It clogged our networks. It was so bad a lot of machines, including the ones on the top floor of this building, had to be taken off line – and that got some unwanted visibility from the CEO.

We called both our AV vendors but neither had a signature for this virus yet. It took a long time and a lot of pain before we found all the machines that were hit, stop the spread to new machines, and got rid of the (expletive deleted) thing. The whole company – every US division and international was affected.

So what does that have to do with my guys going to SANS? It turns out our CEO was in the UK visiting our facility there and somehow the topic of the virus came up and our UK manager told him it had hardly been a problem at all in the UK. He said his security guys found it within a few minutes and cleaned it out. As you might imagine the CEO’s follow-up email to me was unpleasant. So I called my counterpart in the UK and asked him how he had dealt with the attack so easily. He told me one of his guys knew what to do immediately. He said used the built-in Windows WMIC command to find systems with the malware processes running and that also told him about the changes made by the malware. Then, he used the reg command to remove an entry from the auto-start capabilities of infected machines to stop the malware from running on startup. He also said the reg command let him change the USB and CD/DVD autorun function to stop similar infections. After shutting down the malware and stopping it from spreading, he said he used a couple more techniques to clean up the infected machines quickly. I asked where his guy learned all that. He said at SANS, in a course called 504 which I later learned was your Hacker Exploits and incident Handling class. I reported that back to our CEO. He told me to make sure every division had at least two people who knew those techniques. So, our travel ban was lifted for SANS.

==end==

Here’s a link to info on the WMIC command: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742610.aspx?ppud=4

Jonathan Webster, eGroup

http://www.eGroup-us.com

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 Server Edition enables you to restore complete Windows servers in minutes. The really nice footnote here is that this can be done to different hard hardware and/or virtual environments. Under the hood BESR 8.5 comes equipped with new functionality to automate physical to virtual conversions for immediate system recovery.

The installation is straight-forward, and the product is easy to use. The product is very flexible and will allow users to create customized recovery disks, and backup sets utilizing granular restore technology.

In addition, the latest version allows P2V (Physical to Virtual) to perform on an automated schedule. Physical servers can and should be backed moving forward up using BESR 8.5 to VMDK files. In the event a physical box fails – just power up the virtual machine (VM) minimizing downtime, the off site backup copy feature can be utilized to backup server images to FTP locations or secondary disk drive for enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. This is a great advancement in DR planning and should really reign in business’ recovery time objectives (RTO).

All in all, BESR 8.5 is great product and should be utilized moving forward in 2009.

Travis Baird, eGroup