Disaster Recovery Restore Question in Failover Config

[Beth Verish]

Unity 4.1.1, Exchange and AD off box.

If my primary server fails what steps need to be performed to bring back online? Clean install of OS & Unity, bring up as primary, what next? Will the secondary Unity server replicate to the primary or do I restore from DiRT? If I restore from DiRT won't it be from the backup point in time? I am testing disaster recovery so I will try on the servers but would like to know what is suppose to happen. If there is documentation on this please point me to it. Thanks.

[Ginger Dillon]

Hi Beth -

Hope my post find you well :-) You may have already found this document, but if not, here is one that may help - http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_upgrade_guides_chapter09186a0080205a85.html#wp1226403

Note: We do not have a failover environment, but we are working on a disaster recovery document that includes using Veritas Backup. We were in the middle of testing a restore of a Unity lab server (DL380G1) and killed the OS with the restore. G1's saved some specific info on the OS partition, differently from G3 and G4's. So I had to rebuild the server from the ground up, now testing other Unity stuff and planning for upgrade. But I need to get back to testing disaster recovery. Perhaps we could share our learned knowledge? I would be willing to send, via PM, the document we were working on for your review?

Regards, Ginger

[Tommer Catlin]

Well correct me if I am wrong here, but you could just buy another hardisk and mirror that disk. Date the disk and the Unity version that is installed.

Now, just create a weekly or monthly DIRT backup of unity. If the system should completely fail, insert the backup hardrive as primary, boot up the server... use DIRT to restore the Unity settings back to where it was.

If you are using using Veritas or other backup agents, remember that these are tricky with the restore and how they write back to the OS properties, disk partitions, etc. Also,with SQL on the box, the SQL agent needs to be loaded with Veritas so it grabs the complete database records.

Not sure this what you were looking for, but it's a start.

[Beth Verish]

Hi Ginger, Thanks for the post. Ok I have restored the primary server per the documentation. I have just run the restore from backup. Had one error

Error 8007203a opening an LDAP connection. ('LDAP://UNITYEXCHA:389/rootDSE') ::GetNamingContextData)) and was told to run GrantUnityAccess.

I ran GrantUnityAccess to grant administrator access to the SA console. It was unsuccessful with the following error:

Failed getting rowset for subscriber administrator Exiting Function. 0x8004010f \GrantAccess.cpp (line 356)

I can not access SA console logged on as Administartor. Not sure what to do next. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Beth

[Ginger Dillon]

Hi Beth -

The first error looks like you're having problems on the new server getting to the DC. Can you ping the DC from the new server? Also, is the administrator account in the Local Administrators group on the server? I'm wondering if a directory resync would help? Initiate a complete directory synch by doing the following

1. On the Cisco Unity server, browse to the \CommServerTechTools directory.

2. Double-click DohPropTest.exe.

3. In the Logon dialog box, click OK without entering a password.

4. In Password Check message box, click Ignore, which starts DohPropTest in read-only mode.

5. Click AD Monitor

6. On the Directory Monitor dialog box, click TotalResync.

7. Exit DohPropTest.

Ginger