Dennis Wood
Senior Member
We've been backing up a Windows 2012R2 server to a "dedicated backup drive" which is actually an iSCSI target on the QNAP TS870 NAS. This allows us to backup over 10Gbe, without size limitations as the QNAP NAS has a 20TB RAID array to match the server.
The downside is that if you needed to do a bare metal restore of the server, the Server2012 boot media does not have an iSCSI driver integrated. The same would apply to windows 8.1, or Windows 10 if you were using an iSCSI drive for backup.
This blog post by Jim Riekse however solves the problem by providing a step by step process and batch files to modify the Windows PE environment with the required iSCSI files https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...ing-iscsi-with-server-20122012r2/#comment-305
This makes for an incredibly fast and efficient recovery if required, from a boot USB or DVD. I unpacked the Windows Server 2012 R2 install ISO using 7zip, replaced boot.wim (as described in the artice) then used the free WintoFlash Lite program to write the new set of boot files to an 8GB USB drive. The boot USB works beautifully, following the instructions in Jim's blog post to fire up iSCSI, mount your backup iSCSI target, and restore.
The downside is that if you needed to do a bare metal restore of the server, the Server2012 boot media does not have an iSCSI driver integrated. The same would apply to windows 8.1, or Windows 10 if you were using an iSCSI drive for backup.
This blog post by Jim Riekse however solves the problem by providing a step by step process and batch files to modify the Windows PE environment with the required iSCSI files https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...ing-iscsi-with-server-20122012r2/#comment-305
This makes for an incredibly fast and efficient recovery if required, from a boot USB or DVD. I unpacked the Windows Server 2012 R2 install ISO using 7zip, replaced boot.wim (as described in the artice) then used the free WintoFlash Lite program to write the new set of boot files to an 8GB USB drive. The boot USB works beautifully, following the instructions in Jim's blog post to fire up iSCSI, mount your backup iSCSI target, and restore.
