W2K3 Recovery using EMC Legato Networker

A few months ago I had a customer who was having some problems doing a full system restore of a Windows 2003 Server with EMC Legato Networker 7.2.1 –  The EMC Legato Networker folks told the customer that a full system restore was not supported and the Legato Networker was only able to backup and restore files not applications (I know this sounds ridiculous – but it is true).  Over and over EMC support continually stated that Legato only supported  Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) by using the ASR (Automated System Restore) capability inherent in W2K3.  The irony in all of this is that the customer was not attempting a BMR.  The customer merely wanted to do a full restore to a W2K3 host.  While the customer was out of luck due to the fact that EMC Legato would not provide support and they were uncomfortable with an unsupported configuration I took it upon myself to test this scenario.  I have been meaning to do this test and document it for a while but my time is limited.  Thank goodness for holidays and vacation time 🙂

I ran the same test 5 times with the same results. IT WORKED EVERYTIME… I am not sure what the problem is here – maybe just communication.  I would be interested in feedback from anyone having problems doing this or anyone who has done this successfully in production.  Also if you have had similar issues with EMC Legato support I would be interested hearing about them.

5 thoughts on “W2K3 Recovery using EMC Legato Networker

  1. Hello,

    Very interesting video. I’ll try to do the same in my environment. Only one question about Networker 7.2.1 (I’m using 7.1.4) … how do you emulate the tapes/autochanger in the Legato server? Or are you using disck backup?

    Thank you.

  2. Hi Rich,

    I have been using Legato Networker for many years and have a ton of experience with it. I have used the diskbackup option as well as currently use an HP autoloader. I think Networker has really turned from a mediorce product to a real solid one. Tech support has also gone the same path. I have spend hundreds of hours on restore and disaster recovery scenarios with Networker from SQL and Exchange restores to Active Directory. I have done full restores of domain controllers and never have had any real issues…they seem to restore fine with some modifications done after the restores. I think tech support is relatively inexperienced with any operations outside of Networker and when you do have to do a full server restore there are some issues that you need to deal with, but in general Networker can do full restores just fine. I also think you have to find the right engineer and there is one I always ask for if they can get me to him.

    Alex Mook
    University Of Californioa, Santa Barbara

  3. Hi,

    that was great i just started using legato but i need to know one things, dose legato support full system recovery from scratch with out an OS installed for both windows and unix.

    if not dose this method viewed in the demo works for unix.

    thanks

  4. Pingback: Bare Metal Recovery | gotITsolutions.org

  5. Thank you for this, I have been using Networker 7.2.1 for years and
    I have done this in test but never in production, phew.. but it is
    nice to see that you have taken the time to show us how it is done.
    Many thanks. Steve

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