BusinessObjects Content recovery and Disaster recovery – BO XI 3.x

This is the continuation of my previous blog ‘Business Objects Administration- Backup and Recovery’ and this blog is all about BI content recovery and failover recovery.

Content recovery

Consider a situation where you accidentally deleted a folder with business critical reports inside it. Some of the approaches to recover the reports and the folder.

1. Recover the contents from a BIAR backup
2. Recover the contents from another system  (If you are in Prod. recover from QA)
3. Restore CMS and FRS backup in a temporary server and use the Import Wizard to get the desired reports that are deleted.

Let us discuss each method one by one

1. Recover the contents from a BIAR backup

     Recovering contents from BIAR file is straight forward and you should have a appropriate .biar file in hand before restore. We will be using Import wizard to restore the contents.

2. Recover the contents from another system

     We can do the report migration from another environment. If you are in Production environment and you have deleted some reports, we can still recover the reports from QA server. Again we will be using Import wizard to restore the contents.

    We need to ensure that the reports in both environments are in sync and no change is made to reports in Production environment alone (Proper SDLC cycle).

3. Restore CMS and FRS backup in a temporary server

     Sometimes we may need to restore our Business Objects environment back to a given point in time but still keep the original system up and running.This will enable us to investigate and export selected BI content back to the original environment to avoid complete restore. We need to have temporary Business Objects environment setup, FRS and CMS database backups as prerequisites. The recovery sequence would be

·       

• Restore the CMS database and FRS directories to a temporary database and temporary Filestore.
• Log on to the restored CMS database and run the following

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where ParentID=16 

                    (to delete any reference to original Business Objects environment )

• In CCM stop the SIA and Go to Properties -> Configuration tab. Change the data source to point to the restored CMS database and change the cluster name to different to the cluster being restored.Change Cluster name for Input and Output repository servers to same as for CMS.
• Start the SIA and use the Import Wizard to copy the deleted contents directly to the original environment.

Disaster recovery

    For disaster recovery we need to follow the approach which is similar to Approach-3 with some addition steps.

• Restore the CMS database and FRS directories
• Delete all the references to the original server in Disaster recovery CMS database as follows

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where ObjectID= 4  (to delete cluster entries)

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where ParentID=59  (to delete SIA entries)

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where TypeID= 16    (to delete server entries)             

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where TypeID= 17    (to delete server group entries)

              Delete from CMS_INFOOBJECTS6 where ParentID=16  (to delete any BO service if remaining)

• In CCM select “Add Server Intelligent Agent”, Use the Name and Port number of existing SIA (default port-6410) and select  “Create default servers on the new node” and “Recreate Server Intelligence Agent on the local host, if it already exists in the CMS system database”

• Assign a port to the CMS (by default 6400) and select the restored CMS database.

• Once SIA is created, go to SIA > Properties > Configuration and modify the ClusterName of the restored environment to be different from the production environment and start the SIA

• To Delete the Old SIA (node), Go to the CCM
• Create a new SIA, give the name of the SIA you want to delete and use a different port (i.e. 6411)
• Select “Create no servers on the new node” and “Recreate Server Intelligent Agent on the local host if it is already exist in the CMS System database”

• The SIA running is the one coming up

• Provide the Username/password associated and finish the configuration

• After few minutes the system get back to the CCM. Now delete the new SIA created using the Newly created running SIA credentials.

        The old SIA is completely removed and your Business Objects DR Server is ready to use now.

        Hope the blog is Interesting. Keep reading!