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Reply With Quotelaserblazer (9th November 2009)
Is there any reason why I shouldn't net boot the Admin server to Symantec Ghost on the curriculum server and make an image? Seems like a simple way to get things up and running again if we had a server failure.
It depends :-)
Is this a domain controller? If so, then don't do it - if you ever need to restore the image you can end up with a complete mess. Even if it's the only DC (and that's a separate worry!), you'll have users and computers who've changed passwords and this will roll them back. If there's more than 1 DC you can get a completely broken active directory.
If it's not a DC then there's no real problem with making an image
laserblazer (9th November 2009)
It is a DC but there are only around 12 users, so resetting passwords etc., would not be a big deal.
@ laserblazer
Can you let us know how you get on, because I’ve always wondered how Symantec Ghost handles servers e.g. raid, if your server has a raid
Thanks andy
It's not RAID andy, I don't think I'd even consider doing it if it was.Originally Posted by andy_nic
Why's that then? hardware raid presents a bunch of disks to the system as if it was 1 large disk? You then partition it up in windows?
Ben
You still need a driver to see the RAID card though, newer versions of Ghost use WinPE which can have the driver added more easily, the DOS version have virtually no RAID support.
If it is a single DC then there should be no problems using a ghost image for disaster recovery, it is considerably more of a risk in a multi DC environment, it's still a good idea to power down the clients before a restore though.
Only if you use that raid number, which personally i wouldn't use a raid 0.
only usually for windows pc/ms dos usually can see the drives quite happily (at least fdisk can as hdds are almost always ntfs nowadays and servers i would hope all are) so ghosting isnt usually a problem. I have ghosted servers before usually its been the only dc and needed a bigger hdd so ghosted one of the raid disks to a bigger drive then put the new bigger drive back in the pc raid it and let the raid software rebuild the array
I never mentioned any particular flavour of raid and it's not specific to raid 0, any form of raid gives you a large disk which you can then carve up it's the redundancy that's different.
Ben
Not if the drives are connected to a proper RAID controller, some of the onboard RAID controllers will show individual SATA disks when accessed without a driver though.
I've done it a couple of times to quickly recover from a degraded RAID array, including twice on a Dell with PERC RAID card.
No problems any time I've done it.
What I would recommend you do (but it's a little late now), is when you first setup the server, install Windows Server, configure the server name and static IP as appropriate then create an image. Technically the server would still be in a Workgroup.
In the event of a failure, you'd then restore this base image, then perform a full system restore with system state. This would bring the server back online.
RAID drivers will be copied in the image taken. As long as you ghost back to the same hardware you shouldn't experience any problems.
I've tried it with SCSI RAID, SATA RAID, built-in RAID (IDE and SATA), never had a problem...
In theory you still need RAID drivers if booting to a pre-Windows environment, otherwise your imaging software wouldn't see the array.RAID drivers will be copied in the image taken. As long as you ghost back to the same hardware you shouldn't experience any problems.
I do this a lot with Bart PE by adding RAID and NIC drivers periodically as and when I come across hardware which it won't see.
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