About Relax-and-Recover

Relax-and-Recover has a few interesting characteristics you may find useful when assessing it as a Disaster Recovery or Bare Metal Restore solution:

• Modular design, written in Bash
  • easy to extend with custom functionality
  • targeted at sysadmins foremost
• Set up and forget nature
  • designed to be easy to setup
  • designed to require no maintenance (e.g. cron integration, nagios monitoring)
• Recovery image based on original distribution with original tools
  • recovery process remains compatible with original system and applications
  • hardware support is guaranteed
• Two-step recovery, with optional guided menus
  • disaster recovery process targeted at operational teams
  • migration process offers flexibility and control
• Bare metal recovery on dissimilar hardware
  • support for physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-physical (V2P)
  • support for physical-to-physical (P2P) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V)
  • various virtualization technologies supported (KVM, Xen, VMware)
• Support for various integrated boot media types, incl.
  • ISO
  • USB
  • eSATA
  • OBDR/bootable tape
  • PXE
• Support for various transport methods, incl.
  • HTTP
  • HTTPS
  • FTP
  • SFTP
  • NFS
  • CIFS (SMB)
• Extensive disk layout implementation, incl.
  • HWRAID (HP SmartArray)
  • SWRAID
  • LVM
  • multipathing
  • DRBD
  • iSCSI
  • LUKS (encrypted partitions and filesystems)
• Supports various 3rd party backup technologies, incl.
  • CommVault Galaxy (Simpana)
  • Dell / EMC NetWorker (Legato)
  • EMC Avamar
  • Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
  • HP DataProtector
  • IBM Tivoli Storage Manager / IBM Spectrum Protect (TSM)
  • FDR Upstream
  • NovaStor DC
  • Rubrik Cloud Data Management
  • SEP Sesam
  • Symantec NetBackup
  • Veeam Backup
  • Bacula
  • Bareos
  • BorgBackup
  • duplicity / duply
  • Rsync Backup Made Easy (rbme)
• Supports various internal backup methods and restore methods
  • tar
  • rsync
  • restore via NFS4 Server running on rescue system
• Two phase disk layout recovery, allows reconfiguration before recovery, e.g.
  • migrations from e.g. SWRAID to HWRAID, or unencryped to encrypted partitions
  • HWRAID reconfigurations
  • migration from partitions to LVM
• Various techniques to help troubleshooting
  • structured log files and guided menus
  • log files are moved to recovery image, and to recovered system (available in every step for debugging)
  • advanced debugging options to help trace scripts or develop new functionality

• Integration with monitoring (examples for Nagios/Opsview)

• Integration with scheduler (e.g. let cron recreate and transfer your images upon disk layout changes)

• Various best practices to assist recovery

  • integrates with local bootloader (in case it is still possible, you can restore from local disk through Grub)
  • automatic network and ssh configuration (for remote recovery)
  • automatic serial console support (useful for recovery through iLO or KVM serial console)
  • shell history-stuffing (stuff shell history with useful commands at every step)
  • automatic recovery when possible, guided recovery when needed