Disaster Recovery Test - AD Restore

[brian]

My company has been tasked with performing a disaster recovery test next
month. We will be required to take a set of backup tapes with AD or use
Aelita's ER DISK for AD to restore AD. My issues:

1) We will need to restore to different hardware. The DC currently is a
Compaq DL360 and will be restoring to ML570. Different hardware!

2) I can't find any procedure information on doing it to 'same' hardware or
different hardware. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Do we
install Windows 2000 Server, then restore the backup tape overtop the
system? Do we name it the same? We don't have any date on the DC - just AD
(DHCP,DNS,AD,etc)

Brian

 

[KCW]

You're going to want to look at your backup program's
tools.
Generally...
Install OS
Install backup program
Run restore

 

[brian roberson]

OK.. I here ya and this is pretty general. I need to restore to different
hardware which might preclude restoring the 'registry' to the machine. It
will have completely different hardware. I was hoping I would run into
someone that has performed this feat before. I don't need to restore data
from the machine as far as shares go. The machine operates only as a DC
with no other data.

I think I found the microsoft whitepaper on this and i will give it a shot.

Brian

 

[DANNYZEE]

Hello, I suggest you use veritas backup exec 9 - install
it on your current server - take full backup of it
including system state and other partitions etc etc
everything - in the meantime install a fresh copy of
windows 2000 srvr on the new server, install dhcp and dns
as well, it is important the the new will have the same
partitions and the same name as the old server (so in
which case do not connect it to your network, do not
promote it or anything just a 'vegetable' installation
once u done a backup of your old server install veritas
backup exec 9 on the new server, select restore, advanced
settings set it as the primary arbitrator, restore disk
quota,Cluster quorum,insomma click where applicable, u
don't need to restore terminal services database or WMI
and select also overwrite any existing files, pls note
that u dont need to install the service pack on the new
server you have installed on the old server. It might
give u an error at the end of the restore this is normal,
check the size of the restored job if it's somewhere
150MB/200MB below ur original backup it's ok - reboot the
new server & enjoy - BY THE WAY - do a restore on the new
server always in DIRECTORY SERVICES RESTORE MODE - once u
install new server reboot press F8 and select this option
then restore
regards
DANNY ZEE

 

[Steve Dodson [MSFT]]

The following article may be of assistance. I can tell you from experience
that you want the hardware to be as similar as possible - especially the
video card.

How to Perform a Disaster Recovery Restoration of Active Directory on
Dissimilar Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=263532

Hope that helps

Steve Dodson [MSFT]
Directory Services


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Subject: Disaster Recovery Test - AD Restore
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 04:53:06 -0700
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Hello, I suggest you use veritas backup exec 9 - install
it on your current server - take full backup of it
including system state and other partitions etc etc
everything - in the meantime install a fresh copy of
windows 2000 srvr on the new server, install dhcp and dns
as well, it is important the the new will have the same
partitions and the same name as the old server (so in
which case do not connect it to your network, do not
promote it or anything just a 'vegetable' installation
once u done a backup of your old server install veritas
backup exec 9 on the new server, select restore, advanced
settings set it as the primary arbitrator, restore disk
quota,Cluster quorum,insomma click where applicable, u
don't need to restore terminal services database or WMI
and select also overwrite any existing files, pls note
that u dont need to install the service pack on the new
server you have installed on the old server. It might
give u an error at the end of the restore this is normal,
check the size of the restored job if it's somewhere
150MB/200MB below ur original backup it's ok - reboot the
new server & enjoy - BY THE WAY - do a restore on the new
server always in DIRECTORY SERVICES RESTORE MODE - once u
install new server reboot press F8 and select this option
then restore
regards
DANNY ZEE

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[Guest]

I used this article, or rather, the tech who wrote it helped me through a DR test using a lot of this. Not an easy task, and I'd rather have a WAN link to a backup Domain Controller so I always have a spare. It'd be really nice if Microsoft would make a utility that would allow you to take an AD and dump it to a test network, since they always want us to have test networks to work on, and some of us have complicated ADs

Ric

----- Steve Dodson [MSFT] wrote: ----

The following article may be of assistance. I can tell you from experience
that you want the hardware to be as similar as possible - especially the
video card.