Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is a setup-and-forget Linux bare metal disaster recovery solution. It is easy to set up and requires no maintenance.
Relax-and-Recover has a few interesting characteristics you may find useful when assessing it as a Disaster Recovery or Bare Metal Restore solution.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Modular design:
- Easy to extend with custom functionality.
- Targeted at sysadmins foremost.
- Set up and forget nature:
- Designed to be easy to setup.
- Designed to require no maintenance (e.g. cron integration, nagios monitoring).
- Recovery image based on original distribution with original tools:
- Recovery process remains compatible with original system and applications.
- Hardware support is guaranteed.
- Two-step recovery, with optional guided menus:
- Disaster recovery process targeted at operational teams.
- Migration process offers flexibility and control.
- Fully unattended recovery possible for large scale deployments.
- Bare metal recovery on different hardware:
- Support for physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-physical (V2P).
- Support for physical-to-physical (P2P) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V).
- Various virtualization technologies supported (KVM, Xen, VMware).
- Support for various integrated boot media types, including ISO, USB, eSATA, OBDR/bootable tape, and PXE.
- Support for various transport methods, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, NFS, CIFS (SMB)
- Extensive disk layout implementation, including HWRAID (HP SmartArray), SWRAID, LVM, multipathing, DRBD, iSCSI, and LUKS (encrypted partitions and filesystems).
- Supports various 3rd party backup technologies:
- Use backup tool of your choice.
- Restore files from backup software, ReaR takes care of the rest and controls the entire process from bare metal boot to functioning new system.
- Integrates with many commercial and open source backup software.
- With some tools, ReaR can also store the rescue media with the backup software.
- Supports various built-in backup and restore methods: tar, rsync, restore via NFS4 Server running on rescue system.
- Two phase disk layout recovery, allows reconfiguration before recovery, e.g.
- Migrations from e.g. SWRAID to HWRAID, or unencryped to encrypted partitions.
- HWRAID reconfigurations.
- Migration from partitions to LVM.
- Various techniques to help troubleshooting:
- Structured log files and guided menus.
- Log files are moved to recovery image, and to recovered system (available in every step for debugging).
- Advanced debugging options to help trace scripts or develop new functionality
- Integration with monitoring: examples for Nagios/Opsview
- Integration with scheduler e.g. let cron recreate and transfer your images upon disk layout changes
- Various best practices to assist recovery:
- Integrates with local bootloader (in case it is still possible, you can restore from local disk through Grub).
- Automatic network and ssh configuration (for remote recovery).
- Automatic serial console support (useful for recovery through iLO or KVM serial console).
- Shell history-stuffing (stuff shell history with useful commands at every step).
- Automatic recovery when possible, guided recovery when needed
Website: github.com/rear/rear
Support:
Developer: Johannes Meixner, Gratien D’haese, and others
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
ReaR is written in Bash. Learn Bash with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
This article was written with the help of a site visitor who completed this form. Help the site by suggesting new open source software.
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