Disaster Recovery and OCS

  • Article

I have a customer that is looking at a full site recovery with OCS. They have one Enterprise Pool in one location and another Enterprise Pool in a secondary location. The first thing that is required for the backup is to understand what is needed for full recovery. Configuration files for FE, Access Edge, and the Database itself should be in the backup for OCS. Using LCSCMD.EXE from the ResKit you can back up the configfiles.

Examples:

 

lcscmd /config /action:export /level:machine /configfile:c:\backup\{name of FE Server}-Serversettings.xml /fqdn:[fqdn of FE server]

lcscmd /config /action:export /level:machine /configfile:c:\backup\{name of mediation server}-serversettings.xml /fqdn:[fqdn of mediation server]

lcscmd /config /action:export /level:global,pool /configfile:c:\backup\{poolname}-globalandpool.xml /poolname:[poolname]

note (you could split up the last cmd to do global first then pool settings).

also do the Access Edge. This should be backed up when there are changes to the access edge. It's backup can be less frequent then the above backups.

lcscmd /config/action:export /level:machine /configfile:c:\backup\serversettings.xml/fqdn:

 

Backup of the SQL Databases can be done with traditional backup tools. You should backup rtc, rtcconfig, and rtcdyn. RTC database stores persistent user data, including contact lists, access control information, and static conferencing information. The RTCDYN database stores transient conference information, such as the up-to-date participant list and the roles of participants, subscription information, conference lock, etc.

 

restore the above with

lcscmd /config /action:import

On the secondary site deploy OCS using the same pool name, domain, pool FQDN, same SQL Name, internal and external web farm FQDNs, Meeting Content, Meeting Metadata, and ABS share location. Move or restore the databases.

lcscmd /forest[:<forest fqdn>]/action:UpdatePoolBackend /Poolname:<pool name> /poolbe:<pool backend server FQDN\SQL Instance name>

then restore the database and run lcscmd with updatepoolbackend switch.

Use automation tools to automate your business process.