Host-Based Backup and Restore of Virtual Domain Controllers Whitepaper

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whitepaperI’ve seen a couple of vendors release backup products, specifically targeted at Hyper-V. Some solutions utilize the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer to make backups.

The big question, however, is whether this type of backup is of any use to backup Domain Controllers for disaster recovery.

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of issues with image-based backups of Domain Controllers. When you’re running an environment with a single Domain Controller you won’t encounter issues with this kind of backups, but when you’re running multiple Domain Controllers (a best practice), you might encounter USN Rollbacks. Also, when you don’t take into account your tombstone lifetime, you might end up with Lingering objects.

So, how do you tell your Host-based Backup and Restore solution is Active Directory-aware? And what do you have to do when your solution is not, but you need to perform a restore of a virtualized Domain Controller for Disaster Recovery?

I’ve written this down in the following whitepaper:

pdf Host-Based Backups and Restores of Domain Controllers

How to be effective in backing up and restoring virtual Domain Controller with host-based backup solutions for Disaster Recovery purposes

 

 

This whitepaper contains everything you need to know to USN Rollbacks and Lingering Objects in terms of Host-Based Backups and Restores. It discusses way to check for Active Directory-aware backups and restores, and the manual steps you need to perform to get to a supported stage when you restore a Domain Controller with a non-Active Directory-aware restore.

The whitepaper is available for download here.

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