[SCCM 2012 SP1] - Recover Site - It actually Works!

[Gatt]

My entire weekend was spent migrating my Hyper-V environment over to VMWare

 

On the whole it was rather successful - if not plain sailing

 

One of my casualties was the main OS Disk for my SCCM Server - it was well and truly FUBAR due to some bad sectors. The second drive (containig my source files, WSUS files and DP info) was fine, as was the Database which was on a different server.

 

So, I resigned myself to having to face the pain of reinstalling and reconfigure SCCM from the ground up so I installed the prereq's and WSUS and fired up the SCCM installer, and was just about to blindly click through the options when I noticed "Recover Site" - worth a shot.. >CLICK<

 

Recover site? Yep

Reinstall this site server? Yep

Skip DB recovery (use this option if the database was unaffected)? Oh yes!!

 

Clicked through the rest which was the usual questions (Site Code, Site Name, Databse, etc) and it went off and did it!

 

I mean - it actually did it! About an hour later I had a success screen with a few points to attend to (Re-entering some passwords and installing a few hotfixes)

Tentatively opened SCCM Console and there it all was!

 

The only thing I still needed to do was regenerate the SSL Certificate for the IIS server and reapply the DP Certificate and re-apply CU3..

 

half an hour later and it was all up and running again, Software Centre was working on the clients, the Endpoint Protection clients had updated..

 

2 hours to restore from a working DB and Data files, saves 5-ish days of reinstalling and reconfiguring all the settings and deployments!

 

So, if you are using SCCM 2012 - make sure you:

 

Have your SQL Server on a separate server and backed up

Make sure WSUS / Source Files / DPs are all located on a separate drive or server from SCCM itself

 

(Ideally the lot should be backed up, but this was no help in my case as the backup was for Hyper-V and useless with the new VMWare environment!)

[FN-GM]

I did it when i moved the server onto 2012 from 2008 R2. Worked a treat. Makes me more confident in the event of a disaster.

[Gatt]

Indeed - was mildly surprised that all I needed to do was sort out a few Hotfixes and reapply some certificates and passwords!