Are there any products out there that provide a disk imaging solution for AIX (and HPUX and Solaris for that matter)? In a development environment where users are looking to restore an OS quickly back to a certain point in time, what is there available for this besides opening up the system, putting in a disk, and dd'ing each drive?
g4u seems like a great product but works only on Intel-based systems. Am I (or they) out of luck?
The default AIX way is to use mksysb. It is a backu command designed to backup to a tape device. It will make a bootable tape with rootvg. If you have other vg's you will have to use savevg for each of them.
The beauty with this methood is that once in a disaster you only put the tape in the tape drive and boot from that. The boot image on the tape will automatically restore all files, settings, etc. to your disks and reboot the machine from the newly restored image.
I took the above advice and set up a NIM server and took a sysb via NIM. Now my question is, if there's a disk failure on a box and you aren't able to access the OS, how do you go about restoring a NIM sysb image?
The same way you setup the system with NIM but declare a different NIM resource. Bootp the machine after declaring the NIM master as the server in the IP configuration in SMS on the client. On the NIM server declare the machine as a NIM client with the MKSYSB as the NIM resource. It can all be driven from SMITTY.
Hey,
May be a late response from me..., infact I just came across this thread!!
I work as a QA guy for a Disaster Recovery product which as of now supports - all windows / all linux and soon it going to be unix platforms...
you may consider this product for any kind of CDP or Disaster Recovery for your production servers.
if you need further info? mail to me: ask2ilan@gmail.com
cheers,
-ilan
You sure you don't work in sales? 
Unfortunately until it supports HPUX, AIX, and sun4u, it's useless to me. We already have several x86 imaging solutions.
Thanks anyway 
Storix
If memory servers the guy who wrote sysback for IBM broke off and started Storix.
I use it for bare metal restores (mksysb's) of all my intel Linux servers. I believe it works with all *nix
Storix SBAdmin - Linux and AIX Backup / Disaster Recovery Software - Home
Highly recommend it.