DR Please Respond

T

Tim

Need to see how others are doing DR. We have exisiting
Dell Servers. We have now taken the tapes and tried to
recover the servers to other hardware or seperate lan.

The idea being to simulate total failure (Fire ) in
office. No matter what we do, Repair etc we can not get
the servers to function reliably of the "disimilar"
hardware. I have read many of the Howto and followed
many of the procedures. I can get to Active DIrectory
Users and Computers, I can see restored data etc. But
the thing is unreliable on all flavours of hardware that
we have tried as recovery vehicles.

Therefore my question is. ......
Is it truly practical to attempt a full recovery of
servers in event of disaster (On supplied hardware at
time)or are we better rebuilding from scratch and using
ldifde csvde and exchange database imports to get us up
and running with backup tapes of data. We have no second
site with reliable links therefore a replicated server is
not an option.
After all in the main the management may have burnt in
our fire and sid will be largely unimportant as the PC`s
will have fuelled it :)
Thanks in advance
Tim
..
 
R

Ray Lava [MSFT]

Tim,

I think that I responded to you earlier this week pertaining to this
question. If you did not receive it, here it is again. If you received it
but are looking for someone else's opinion, then please disregard.

You are absolutely correct that doing full restores including system state
to dissimilar hardware is a very iffy prospect. You have obviously already
read kb article 263532 which deals with this topic and explains why
Microsoft cannot guarantee that restoring domain controllers to dissimilar
hardware will work. In fact, the more dissimilar the hardware, the less
likely the restore will be successfully.

Your best bet would be to try to have two servers with exactly the same
hardware. One of those servers would be a functioning DC, then other would
be kept offsite. While this can be an expensive proposition, you could
always purchase two low end servers for this purpose. As long as the low
end domain controller does not hold any FSMO roles or run any apps such as
exchange, terminal server or hold any FSMO roles, it authenticate users and
replicate with your other DCs without any problems. Make sure that you are
getting system state backups of your low end DC so that in a worst case
scenario, you could do your restore to your low end server that you keep
offsite.

I hope this helps.

Ray Lava
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
 

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