BE 2010 AD only restore different hardware

[rpcblast]

I am curious what the best way to handle the following situation.  This has not happened yet, but I could forsea in the future. 

Single domain controller fails.  You have a system state/AD backup, and purchase a new server that is totally different hardware.  You install the server OS, name it the same as the failed DC, and install BE.  However, if you do a system state restore, from what I understand, this could cause massive issues.  Is there a way to only restore AD?(under system state, AD was greyed out, had to select all of system state, unless I drilled down to restore individual objects within AD).  Is there another way to do this, assuming you dont have a file level backup of the system drive?

[CraigV]

If you named your standby server with the same name, gave it the same IP address, and had the same sized partitions, you should be able to recover the DC like that.

If you restore the System State of your failed DC to the standby DC with a different name, AD is most likely going to break, as well as the server itself.

[rpcblast]

I understand about the name, what I am concerned about is the hardware.  I was able to perform a test recovery successfully, however it was to similar hardware(virtual to virtual).  I am more worried about what happens when the hardware is drasticlly different(single core to multi core, different controller, intel to AMD, etc).  I know that you install the OS first before the restore, but if you have to restore the entire system state, doesnt that also include some driver/system stuff, including possibly the HAL and all

[CraigV]

Well, if I was doing it, and restoring a backup from an Intel-based DC to an AMD-based DC, I would always run a driver installation straight afterwards.

I don't think moving to a server with multi-cores and more RAM makes a difference.

[rpcblast]

So the recomendation would be to force a driver install on the chipset, controller, etc, right after the system state restore?  It just seems that this is kind of a cheesy way to go about it, and there should be a better way to just do an AD restore, especially for a product such as BE. 

[pkh]

If you install the AD Remote Agent option, then you can restore individual AD objects.  It would help in a situation like what you describe.

[rpcblast]

so you could recover all of AD from scratch this way?

[pkh]

I have never tried to. I will always have at least 2 DC's in each domain.

[teiva-boy]

BackupExec comes with for free (unlike in older pre-11d builds) an option called IDR, or Intelligent Disaster Recovery.  This is used to restore a backup from a tape set to a completely downed server.  Though, it must be the same hardware type for the most part (at least chipsets and storage HBA's for sure).  

If you are looking for a more full featured bare metal recovery product that will allow you to backup and recover to just about any hardware, physical and virtual, you will want BackupExec System Recovery.  

As the name implies, it's for complete system recovery in the case of a disaster.  

[rpcblast]

I appreciate all the responses.  I guess in any company with more than a couple servers they would have mutliple domain controllers so this wouldnt be an issue.  I guess in theory I could just backup ntds.dit and restore it manually. 

[Colin_Weaver]

This could be an issue that most backup products would experience to lesser or greater extent. IDR does have some capabilities to handle dissimilar hardware during a restore, however if really concerned then I would go down the make sure you have 2 Domain controllers route or consider the the BESR Restore Anywhere option (just for your DC) which has much better disssimilar Hardware and rapid DR recovery capablities.

The other option is to restore your System State and expect to then have to troubleshoot hardware issues (up to an including a blue screen on reboot due to invalid hardware drivers trying to load) - Basically even with software that tries to handle dissimilar hardware the potential for something from the old system to try and load hardware support that then causes instability on the new system will always have to be a concern against DR with differing hardware (no matter what backup product is used)

As an aside you can redirect a System State restore to a file system and it will recover a folder structure containing the various key files that are part of the System State (so should allow NTDS.DIT to be recovered as a file. You would then have to refer to Microsoft for how to use this redirected file however. Similarly because this file is part of the System State it can't (by default) be backed up as a file system backup it has to be a System State one.

I wouldn't use ADRA for this as you would need to recreate an empty domain with the same details first so would have to make sure you had good documentation to cover that and even then as ADRA is not designed for DR there might be hidden AD objects that ADRA wouldn't recover.