Avamar system state recovery for WIN 2008 servers

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Hey NA,

I don't have many experience on Windows BMR. But you can refer to Chapter 5 Bare Metal Recovery EMC Avamar 7.0 for Windows Server on page 115.

Hope it can help to you.

Hi Leo,

Thanks for reply.

I have read document , but my concern is :

we're doing system state backups for win 2008 servers , .In times of system state recovery , we have to download the ISO image and follow the wizard.

But doc saying , ISO image is todo BMR . I'm confused , so in avamar ,BMR and System state recovery are same ?

Can someone help on this ...

Is it a virtual server?  If so then just do a VM snapshot backup.

Hey NA,

Kevin has been abstracted some points from EMC Avamar 7.0 for Windows Server for you as above. Please to refer that first.

Thanks Kevin,

So in Avamar , system state recovery for win 2008 servers is actually Bare metal recovery ?

From this point general case , " BMR enables you to restore a server without having to rebuild the operating system " ...to restore system state 1st OS has to be installed ,if its BMR, OS also will be recovered ...please clarify

From my first statement "A backup for bare metal recovery (BMR) includes the system state and critical disks." we can tell that BMR has included system state recovery.

About the restore step, your understanding is correct.

Please mark my answer as correct/helpful answer if it helps.

Thanks again for clarification .

Does that mean, by running that ISO image can we just restore system state instead of doing bare metal restore ?

Because  we have to restore system state , but BMR is not needed

yes, yes.

Please mark my answer as correct/helpful answer if it helps.

You are right.

how do we make Avamar understand that we don't need BMR for other drives other than the OS?

example, our servers have S drive and BMR backup of the same is close to 100GB after dedupe, which we want to exclude

The list of critical volumes is decided by the Windows Automated System Recovery VSS writer, not by the Avamar software. If the OS tells us that a volume is critical, we have no choice but to back it up. The most common cause of non-system disks being marked as critical volumes is the presence of a service binary on the volume.

If a third party piece of software installs a binary that runs as a service onto a volume, that volume will be marked critical. If I recall correctly, there is an option in the Avamar 7.1 client to ignore non-critical services when deciding what volumes are critical.

If the S drive is being backed up during regular file system backups, you don't lose anything but time if it's backed up again during VSS System State backups -- it won't consume any additional storage on the back-end and most or all of the data will be in the client caches so there will be relatively little network traffic. If the data on the S drive should be backed up anyway and the system is backing up within a reasonable backup window, this may not be something you need to "fix".

on our Active directory server, backup completes with warning if we enable BMR and completes with exceptions (should be treated as failure) if we disable BMR

EMC helped us to exclude using registry (SR 69504922), but issue is persisting only on active directory servers

EMC is asking us to followup with MS why the path is not being ignore by VSS

did anyone else face this situation