Ghost Solution Suite

Hi

this is a pre-sales enquiry.

i'm having a real problem trying to find a solution that will successfully create a complete bare-metal backup of a Dell Poweredge T420 and restore it to a Dell Poweredge 2900 therefore creating a clone of the T420.

The T420 is running windows server 2008 with SQL server 2012, it has a 1TB raid drive (only 300gb being used) and running EFI boot

the Dell PE 2900 is older and has a 600gb raid drive and running a Bios boot

the built-in windows backup software won't restore to a machine with the different Bios boot and Redo backup software won't restore to a different drive size. Acronis looks like it will work but its really expensive.

does anyone know if the Symantec Ghost Server Solution will work?

many thanks

jason

You face a number of issues trying this. The currently shipping release of Ghost Solution Suite does not have UEFI support although there are some new updates (available only to those that buy maintenance) which add this support. You also face issues with the requirement for different drivers to be present for these different hardware units. There is also the operating system and SQL server licensing issue as a bare metal backup will not get around Microsoft's licensing methodology which will recognise that the hardware has changed and will require you to re-enter the licensing information.  You might want to check out Paragon Partition Manager which has a free edition for personal use and uses WinPE natively, as I suspect that the total costs of getting Ghost with maintenance will be greater than the cost of the Acronis solution.

thanks a lot for your advice - i had a feeling it wasn't going to be easy.

its purely to create a redundant backup machine in-case of emergencies

i'll checkout Paragon

cheers

It may be simpler just to build the redundant machine up from scratch rather than trying to clone the existing setup. At least you will know that the drivers and general installation are solid and less likely to show issues if you do have to use them as an emergency spare. Unless of course you can give the backup system a good workout in a production environment to check it is solid.