Use case

The first recovery plan are usually cumbersome with lots of manual steps. A good recovery plan is highly automated, to enable quick restoration of the system.

When considering this, you have already made the recovery guide. If no, start here for the guidelines.

Automating

Your guide will have some distinct parts, depending on which baseline you have decided upon.

1. Setting up host and hypervisor.
2. create and setup virtual machines in the hypervisor environment
3. orchestrate the virtual machines

setting up host and hypervisor

1. assume that you have a functioning debian host

2. create a script to automate installation of hypervisor.

   Go here for a complete install script of vmware workstation on Debian

   It includes whatever patcehs are need to make vmware work.

3. set up vmnets

   Look into the commandline tools called vmware-networks

references:

• official vmware documentation

create and setup virtual machines in the hypervisor environment

(untested)

1. Have the base files

   Your VMware workstation VMs reside in VMX files. There might be an import for ova files.

2. clone the machines

   copy the machines from backup to where you want them

   Perhaps vmrun cloneis relevant

3. use vmrun

   The tool vmrunhas many option. See vmrun --help.

   It is able to start, stop and lots of other things.

orchestrate the virtual machines

1. log into the machine

2. create script to run on the VMs

   a) linux: Use a script

   The script includes the commands that you otherwise need to type manually,

   wget on is useful.

    ```
    #!/bin/sh
   
    apt-get install apache
    wget config
    cp to somewhere
   
    cd /var/www/http
    git clone website
   
    service restart apache
    ```
   

   b) Junos: load override

   You default image will not have much in terms of config.

   A sequence like

    ```
    edit
    load override scp://<serverip>/config
    commit
    ```
   

   This could work well with archive-sites

3. Use expect in bash or paramiko to execute the scripts

   A bit on Expect

   A bit on paramiko

Remarks

• This is guide work-in-progress