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celcat's avatar
celcat
Level 3
11 years ago
Solved

Full Domain Controller recovery - BE 2014

All,

I'm trying to get to the bottom of the process being recovering an AD controller to new hardware when no other AD controller is present. In my test environment, I have managed to recover the Backup Exec Media Server and have placed it in a workgroup as the domain is of course not available. Looking at the documentation, I have setup the new server which will be the new AD Server and also just left it in a workgroup. I'm now trying to work out the recommended way to recover the AD Environment. So far I'm not having any luck changing the target to a different server.

I've been advised that I cannot do this recovery using Simple Disaster Recovery which is fine but I do need to know how to do this. I was thinking that the domain should be setup as a clean domain and then restore the system state and do an authoratitave restore but the Admin Guide for backup exec does not suggest this. 

Has anyone managed to do this and if so, could you point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance

Chris

Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Recovering
Restore
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • celcat's avatar
    celcat
    11 years ago

    All,

    Just to update you on this. The reason it appears why AD was not working after the simple disater recovery is because the System State of the AD Server was not being backed up correctly. The System State in the job is selected and the jobs are sucessful but I noticed I was getting errors like the following: -

    VSS Snapshot warning. File c:\windows\einstaller.exe is not present on the snapshot.

    Upon further investigation, it appears that these services are invalid on the AD Server so I have been through the registry and removed these. My backups are now still working as before but I am now able to select the System State on my restored media server so why the failings of these services is causing the whole system state to not back up correctly is beyond me. The other issue this caused was a loading media problem on the restored Media Server during a catalog operation which since removing the invalid services, it also now working fine.

    Thanks to everyone for your feedback on this.

    Regards

    Chris

     

7 Replies

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  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    ...The Admin Guide wouldn't suggest that as it would be as per Microsoft Best Practice. Have you checked out their documentation around this?

    Thanks!

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    I've been advised that I cannot do this recovery using Simple Disaster Recovery

    Whose advice is this and what is the reason?

    Without SDR, you would not be able to restore to dissimilar hardware because of driver incompatibility

  • celcat's avatar
    celcat
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    Thanks for the reply. I'm struggling with errors in Backup Exec at the moment but I'll have a look at the MS documentation as well.

    Regards

    Chris

     

  • celcat's avatar
    celcat
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    It was the advice from someone at Symantec Enterprise support. The reason I expect was because I am restoring to different hardware.

    My plan now is to start the AD setup again and then restore the system state in AD recovery mode and restore the database. I believe this is the expected route but I've not had a look at the suggested method from MS yet.

    Regards

    Chris

  • Colin_Weaver's avatar
    Colin_Weaver
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    I am not sure you can get to

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/backup-exec-2014-technical-white-paper-bare-metal-and-dissimilar-hardware-recovery

     

    But just in case you can't the document in that link states:

    The core technology that enables the bare metal and dissimilar hardware restore capabilities within Backup Exec™ 2014 is called Simplified Disaster Recovery (SDR).

     

    As such you probably need to re-open the SDR discussion with the person within Enterprise Support

     

  • celcat's avatar
    celcat
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    Thanks Colin for the response. I do appear to be getting some mixed messages around SDR. I have actually managed to restore the Backup Exec Media Server to totally different hardware using SDR and it's working very well.

    I did the SDR on the domain controller and although it restored ok and logged in, I kept getting issues with the Domain Services being unavailable. Since then, I have found an article online suggesting this may be because I'm missing a registry setting that tells the AD Server that the database is consistent or something to that affect.

    I'll post back if and when I have further updates.

    Regards

    Chris 

  • celcat's avatar
    celcat
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    All,

    Just to update you on this. The reason it appears why AD was not working after the simple disater recovery is because the System State of the AD Server was not being backed up correctly. The System State in the job is selected and the jobs are sucessful but I noticed I was getting errors like the following: -

    VSS Snapshot warning. File c:\windows\einstaller.exe is not present on the snapshot.

    Upon further investigation, it appears that these services are invalid on the AD Server so I have been through the registry and removed these. My backups are now still working as before but I am now able to select the System State on my restored media server so why the failings of these services is causing the whole system state to not back up correctly is beyond me. The other issue this caused was a loading media problem on the restored Media Server during a catalog operation which since removing the invalid services, it also now working fine.

    Thanks to everyone for your feedback on this.

    Regards

    Chris