Any good private cloud software should have backup and restore capabilities. Most organizations have requirements to backup data in case of data corruption, or other failures. Frequently backing up data gives administrators the ability to restore data and bring back any lost functionality fairly quickly. In this section, let's take a quick look at what data is backed up by PowerVC, and how to restore the backed up data. We provide the PowerVC backup command. This command is located under /user/bin/powervc. This command can be used to backup PowerVC application data. What exactly gets backed up? First, the internal databases which hold data like the names of Virtual Machines, names of images, and so on. Second, all OpenStack services configuration data such as the ones under /etc/nova, /etc/glance, and so on. Third, glance image repositories, that is, the images or snapshots of Virtual Machines that's stored by PowerVC. This is not a full operating system backup, as you can see, it's a backup of the data that is stored on the PowerVC software for its functionality. Finally, when you are backing up or restoring data from, and to, PowerVC, all services will be stopped. All users will be logged out, and there'll be shown a prompt on the GUI that maintenance is going on. Make sure you do this during the maintenance window of your organization. What does running the PowerPC backup command do? The simple answer is that it creates a compressed tar.gz file. The command will create a subdirectory named with the current timestamp to determine when the backup operation was performed. The compressed file is then stored in this directory. If no target directory is specified in the command, the default /var/opt/ibm/powervc/backups directory is used to store the compressed file. An example directory is shown here, there is an inbuilt account named powrvcdb, which needs to have read and execute access to the directory structure, in order to create and store this file. This command only backs up IBM PowerVC data, and there's no scheduling mechanism that is built into the PowerVC backup command. Here's an example command which doesn't prompt you for any input, and uses a specified target directory to store the backup file. Finally, what about log files for this operation? Log files for Backup and Restore are stored at the /opt/ibm/powervc/log directory. Here, are the locations of the log files for both the backup and restore operations. In case you run into any problems, how do you restore the PowerVC application to its previous state? Well, that's easy, you use the PowerVC restore command. This command will help you restore, to a working state, after data corruption or any other disaster. You specify the target directory in the input of this command, not the backup file name. Also, note that the backup file name must be the same IBM PowerVC version. For example, you can't use PowerVC 1.3.1 to create the backup and restore it on PowerVC 1.4.1. Also, the operating system levels used for backup and restore should be same. Many client administrators prefer to create new backups after each software update, but that's up to you. Now, here's an example command, we use the no prompt attribute to make it a subnet restore, and specify the directory from which the backup file should be retrieved. Let's now talk about a few restore related tips. If, let's say you lost all access to PowerVC, and want to rebuild it from scratch with only the backup file at hand, then first, you need to install the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system again. Ensure that it's the same version as what it was before you lost access. Then you need to manually install IBM PowerVC again, and update it to the same version that it was before. Finally, you just restore the data using the PowerVC minus restore command we talked about before. To do this, of course, you need to have backed up that compressed file to an external source, something most clients currently do. If you'd written any custom scripts or cron jobs, these would have to be manually recreated as these would not have been part of the backup. One other common issue to watch out for is that your PowerVC should be running on the same architecture. Remember that the PowerVC software can run on X86 based Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines. You can't backup from the PowerVC running on X86 and use the backed-up file to restore the PowerVC running on the PPC architecture. Also, ensure that the same underlying networking and storage environment are available through the [inaudible] and HMC. What would be the quickest way to restore any lost data? Well, the first step is to plan for these failure scenarios and always keep a warm standby of PowerVC on hand. This would be a second installation of IBM PowerVC in case something happens. Then all you do is just move your backed-up file and perform restore on the new PowerVC, thus minimizing downtime. Of course, the drawback to this would be the extra resources used to maintain the second PowerVC. Now, with backup and restore out of the way, we're going to look at some PowerVC settings in the next video.
