I’m a week late with this post. Reading Dilbert in last Sunday’s comics, it’s apparent to me that either Scott Adams has been away from high tech work too long, or he decided to avoid mentioning virtual servers.
Today, if a server’s operating system has a problem that’s bad enough you’ve given up on it, you simply blow away the virtual machine it’s running on, and assign its database drive(s) to another virtual server. Recovering the data isn’t necessary unless the problem on the server corrupted or damaged the database, in which case you restore it from a backup copy. Redeploying an old server doesn’t apply, because it was on a virtual machine. But maybe Dilbert’s company is out of date and still runs only physical servers, in which case there’s all the more reason to wonder how it stays in business.