DR Recovery Overview

[mhlevy]

I didn't seem to be able to find any sort of information regarding an overview of the restore procedure in case of a catestrophic failure on a multi-domain, multi-mailstore ZCS system.

At this moment, I'm waiting to hear back from a Zimbra engineer in India on why our restore of a crashed mailstore server crapped out.

We had a VM storage volume that was corrupted beyond recovery, so I had to start a new Linux installation, then fresh Zimbra, and then copy the restore sessions from out off-line storage server, only to have problems with restoring incremental backups using the replay logs, as per the Wiki.

Is there a "high level Overview" of what it would take to do a "bare-VM" recovery of one of our Zimbra servers.

We've got 2 ldap/mta/mailstore servers & a proxy server, ZCS 8.0.7. Our ZCS system actually hosts 10 email domains, and we've got about 1400 users. One of those 2 above mentioned servers crashed hard, and was unrecoverable.

So Is there an overview of what it would take to restore the Zimbra server as quickly as possible?

Thanks!

Mark

[Cine]

Hello mhlevy!

A ZeXtras Backup Disaster Recovery guide can be found on the ZeXtras Wiki at Zx Backup: Disaster Recovery - ZeXtras Suite Wiki, along with all the ZeXtras Suite and ZxMig technical docs.

ZeXtras Backup makes the DR process quite easy, both on single- and multi-mailstore server, and the steps to perform it can be roughly summed up as:

- Install Zimbra on a new server - or on more if needed.
- Install ZeXtras Suite on all new servers.
- Manually apply Global and Server configurations: ZeXtras Backup does backup such settings but, due to the nature of global and server config, there is no automated restore.
- Start an "External Restore" using the old server's backup path as the import path: all domains, DLs, Aliases, COSs, mailboxes and any user data will be automatically restored. Furthermore, mailboxes will be available moments after the restore is started - thus minimizing your users' downtime by a great lot.
- Run the `zxsuite backup doFixShares` command to fix share rights consistency.

Bonus: if you're running on a multi-mailstore environment you won't need to perform a 1:1 restore, but you can import multiple backup paths to a single server or split a backup path between multiple servers

Have a nice day,
Cine
the ZeXtras Team