We’ve been working with our backup vendor to address some shortcomings of their product as it relates to Windows 2008 system recover. This was precipitated by a failure of a portion of our virtual infrastructure, which lead to corruption of several hosts’ virtual disk files.
We managed to rebuild one failed host from bare (virtual) metal, because EMC Networker could not recover the system from backups. For Server 2008 systems, they require backups made with client 7.5.1 and restored with 7.5.1 and you have to enable/install any server role that was present on the original system before performing the restore.
We’ve been working on other ways to make sure we can recover from a system failure. Greg has successfully scripted using server 2008’s printer management scripts to dump printer info to files. I’ve been working on scripted backup of SharePoint Site collections. I got some help from Microsoft in determining the correct permissions needed for a service account to perform STSADM backup operations, which has been a thorny issue. ( see KB896148 )
