Our site has implemented a new disaster recovery plan in case of catastrophic failure of our DeltaV DCS servers. We are currently have DeltaV version 12.3.1 running on Windows 2008 installed on real servers. We have not yet taken the step to virtualize them. To recover from a complete failure of a ProPlus server (water ingress, lighting, fire, etc...), we make daily backups using the embedded Windows Server Backup set for "Bare metal recovery". We have a spare server that is as identical to the ones installed in the production area as we can get it. Both were purchased at the same time from Emerson. The plan is simply restore the image to the new hard-ware. At least we would like to keep it that simple.
However in testing, I have found an issue with the network adapters. The servers have four embedded network ports: one is used for the DeltaV primary control network; one is used for the DeltaV secondary control network; the third is used for plant LAN connection; and the fourth one is not used. When the image is restored, if you look under the Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections there are four network adapters visible but they are un-configured. I am unable to reconfigure them to match the original settings for Windows tells me the name already exist.
Doing some research, I found a way to show the four original configured network adapters. They are ghosted. The only way to reconcile is to uninstall the ones imported from the image. I can then reconfigure the four real network adapters. DNS recovers and so does Active Directory. However DeltaV services will no longer start due to missing "COMM registry" entries. This makes sense for I uninstalled the four ghosted adapters.
So....How does a person go about restoring a Windows 2008 full metal backup to a new server hardware and then reconciling the restored network adapters with the physical network adapters?
Chris,
This doesn't appear to be directly related to our Backup and Recovery solution, so we don't have an official KBA on this, but the question was posed to our Product Engineering team:
Here is the procedure to get rid of the old NICs so that the new ones can be given the same IPs and names as the old.
From a command prompt run …
SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
START DEVMGMT.MSC
Once the Device Manager window opens, select Show Hidden Devices from the View menu
Expand the Network adapters node and Uninstall any Intel/Broadcom/QLogic adapters that are greyed out. NOTE … there are other greyed out nodes here that should not be removed (e.g. the RAS Async Adapter below should not be removed). Once these are uninstalled the IP addresses and friendly names that were linked to them will be removed as well. This will allow you to give the new connections the old names and IP addresses.
There are some DeltaV registry entries that use the network adapter's GUID (a hidden unique Windows identifier), therefore you would need to rerun Workstation Configuration after you finish configuring the adapters on the new machine, ProPlus or otherwise.
Brian
In reply to chris williams:
In reply to Brian Atkinson:
1.) Delete ghosted adapters
2.) Redefine existing adapters
3.) Reboot
4.) Restart DNS
5.) AD recovers on its own.
6.) Reboot
7.) Re-run workstation configuration. This forces a log-off log-on. However DeltaV services will not start.
8.) Reboot
9.) DeltaV services start normally on their own.
10.) Re-register Windows OS license.