How to do your Periodic Recovery Tests on Amazon EC2

[HuseyinBilgen]

Why Recovery?

Most of the times, customers are asking us to make an assessment for  their Backup and Recovery procedures and infrastructures.

When we checked, we see that they are only backing up their systems, but unable to restore it to anywhere. So, backup up only helps them to feel better and safe. But, in reality this is the biggest danger. In one of our customer, the managers and IT team unaware of the used Backup Solution, schedule and Library. Only one Guy knows it and they fired him before getting all info from him.

Thats why, we always suggest customers to do a disaster test for all mission-ciritical systems (including SAP and Non-SAP) periodically and at least twice per year.

In my first blog (Why we use Amazon AWS as our SAP System Landscape), I tried to summarize our Cloud Based SAP Infrastructure lying on Amazon EC2 Cloud Servers.

Now, its time to give Recovery Test procedure on Amazon AWS Services for our systems.

Procedure

The following procedure is tested for an ERP 6.0 EHP5 SAP System running on Windows 2008 R2/SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit environment but will work for every SAP solutions and platforms.

Summary of the Steps

• Setup a new temporary EC2 Instance
• Install SQL Server 2008 R2
• Connect the Instance to the Amazon S3 Storage System
• Download the Latest Backup
• Restore Backup
• Install SAP ERP 6.05 with SAPINST
• Check the System

1. Setup a new temporary EC2 Instance

2. Wait at least 15 minutes for Instance praparation. Then  select the Get Windows Password to get the Administrator Password.

3. Connect to the Server RDP with the decrypted password. You don't need to give an Elastic IP as this server will be used for internal tests.

4. Add a new Disk for SAP System

5. Download the Installation Master, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Kernel DVDs from http://service.sap.com

6. Install SQL Server 2008 R2 (or whatever it is in your case)

7. Use any tool of your choice. Here some alternatives:

• Amazon S3 Browser via http://s3browser.com/
• S3Fox Addon for Firefox browser (This is my choice)

After, put your Amazon S3 Access Credentials for connection

8. Download the latest Database Backup

9. Restore the database with SQL Server Management Studio

Select your database and latest Transsaction Log to test a point-in-time and full recovery.

Select the destination for each file (may be different on recovery system)

10. When Database Restore finished, start the SAPINST from SAP Installation Master DVD to install the SAP System over restored DB.

Select the Backup/Restore for the System Copy method.

11. After installation, test that you are able to logon to the system.

12. Finally, when all tests gone well, terminate the Amazon EC2 Instance to stop paying.