The two most common applications that run on Windows Servers are Microsoft Exchange Server and MS-SQL Server. Other common types of Windows Server are domain controller, Active Directory, and Web Server. The servers may be running Windows 2008 or Windows 2003 or even Windows 2000.
Bare Metal Recovery technology is able to quickly recover an unusable system. It can restore both system and data in a single pass, eliminating the need for multiple backups and significantly reducing downtimes. Bare-metal restore is a technique where the backed up data is available in a form which allows one to restore a computer system from “bare metal”, i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system. Typically, the backed up data include the necessary operating system, applications and data components to rebuild or restore the backed up system to an entirely separate piece of hardware. Bare-metal differs from the local disk image restore and the simple data backup. The local disk image restores from a copy of the disk image and the software performing the restore is invoked by booting the server with the setup/installation disk. Windows server backup supplied with the OS is not designed to be an enterprise-level solution. The simple data backups only the application data, but neither the applications nor Windows itself are backed up or restored. Bare metal restore for rebuilding a server from ground up is offered by many disaster recovery solution providers. Enterprise-level disaster recovery solutions nowadays deploy server virtualization technology.
A mirror image of the client’s complete system is created using a separate storage device. The device is then taken to the data center of the vendor and stored as a virtual server on the datacenter servers. The virtual server software hides the physical hardware from the virtual servers. The virtual server software creates a generic hardware platform that’s consistent, regardless of the actual physical hardware used to host the virtual servers. This simplifies the bare metal restore process, because the hardware platform is always consistent. Virtual servers appear as files on the host server, so to perform a bare metal restore, all that is to be done is to restore the virtual server image files.
Before virtualization, one had to maintain a one-to-one relationship between the production servers and the standby servers. Using virtualization, one can replicate five production servers on a single server running multiple instances of a virtual operating system.
