Backup and disaster recovery of CiscoWorks VMS

[jodr]

Hello all,

We are setting up disaster recovery procedures for our CiscoWorks VMS environment. However it is not very clear what to backup and how we have to do this. As I understand from the docs until now, there are two ways for backup that have each their own application :

1. VMS backup database : via VPN/Security Management Solution/Administrator/Common Services/Backup Database :

This backups the VMS database for all client applications. The result is also a safe copy of the licensing database.However no user account information is saved. This has to be backed up via the CiscoWorks server utilities.

2. CiscoWorks server utilities : I understand this as being the backup tool via Server Configuration/Administration/Database Management/Backup Data Now or Schedule Backup :

This should be used then to backup also user account info.

Under the topic 'Restore the Database', there the remark is repeated that no user account info is backed up, so this Restore cannot be used to recover deleted accounts. How do we have to restore then this part of the story ?

Additionally, also license information is not restored. So on a full restore, we have to re-enter the license ?

When I configure the tool under 2 via Schedule Backup, no files are saved in fact. However I see in the dbbackup.log file that this job is triggered everytime. I created for this purpose a separate directory, but nothing is being written down into this directory.

All these are important questions to have a reliable disaster recovery plan.

Thanks for any help,

Johan.

[ywadhavk]

Hi Johan,

On the Disaster Recovery server, you will already have the VMS installed with the same license (but offline) To convert this server into production, you will restore the backup from the VMS as you mentioned in step 1. This will take care of the VMS devices, events and configs.

As for the user database, the step 2 will take care of that.

I guess in your design, there already is a hot standby server loaded with CW VMS ready to accept the latest restore. You can simply have the license file ready to be applied to this server or have it installed already during the initial install and bring it online in case the production goes bust.

Hope this helps,

yatin

[patricko]

Hi Yatin,

We are currently attempting to create a recovery plan for out VMS install. I am wondering if Cisco has published detailed instructions indicating specifically which utilities backup the IDSMC, Security Monitor, and the CiscoWorks information such as user accounts? I have yet to locate anything specific that give a step by step process for backups. Although the process appears simple enough via the gui interface I have yet to whitness a successful backup for what I belive to be the IDS-MDC database. I believe I have successfully backedup the user information for CW. Also, Is there a manual process for backing up the idsmdc.db/idsmdc.log and are there any other files that would need to be backed up? Could we script a job to compress the db and then archive it?

Any advice or locations for good documentation would be appreciated!

POB