BMR (P2P, P2V and even V2P)

When not stealth launching products, something EMC tends to do more and more frequently, the company makes stealth acquisitions. Indigo Stone developer of HomeBase was one of those.

What I'm considering doing during my frequent commutes is spending a couple of paragraphs putting a spotlight on some of the less well known products I work with. HomeBase, though not new to a ton of larger organizations might be new to you so it's not a bad place to start.

So what is EMC HomeBase?

HomeBase is a heterogeneous Bare Metal Restore product which uses profile capture instead of image capture. We all know of BMR products where you juggle full system images for different hardware configs, HomeBase does away with that by splitting the installation into logical layers and those layers into unique elements. The three main layers are the Application Layer (Where apps and app/user data reside), the Root Layer (Where the OS Binary's and drivers are located), and the Configuration Layer. (Where hardware, software and other system config settings or stored)

Getting more granular the Configuration Layer can be broken down into Functional Elements (Security, performance etc) and Support Elements (Storage/Network configurations etc)

This system state information is captured on a scheduled basis, usually before a backup and packaged into what's called a Profile. This profile is then encrypted and transmitted to the HomeBase server where upon arrival the HomeBase Differential Factoring Engine compares this latest profile to previous profiles and can flag any systems which have been modified into a non-compliant state against whatever corporate standards might be in place. So you also have change management and other such functions in there.

Picture. Thousand words.

By breaking the configuration information out you now have the ability to perform BMR to dissimilar hardware without requiring a pre-built image to support that hardware. Blast down a standard image, apply the profile, restore your data and apps and you're good to go.

But it gets more interesting. Using the profile model you can now go Physical to Virtual if you're consolidating physical servers onto something like ESX, but you can also go Virtual to Physical if for whatever reason you need to move out of a Virtual Machine and onto physical hardware.

Maybe test and dev is in a VM but you plan on running production on physical hardware.

There's more, but my train has just arrived at the station.

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

Great overview, Mark. I wasn't too familiar with what HomeBase did, and now I'm better off.

Any other nice nuggets to share?

[Storagezilla]

Oh yes, when time allows. ;)