Restoring a full Virtual Machine from backup

[ronan125]

I am looking at performing a DR test and am looking for information about restoring an Exchange 2007 server to a different location.

I backup the enitre exchange virtual server from VMWare using Backup Exec. My question is can I simply shut done the current server and then restore the server from backup to my DR location and power it up. I will then change the IP address to that subnet etc..

Will this cause any problems regarding AD or should it be ok. Once this has been completed I will shutdown the DR server and power back up the original server.

The site I will be restoring to already has a DC located there.... my company has two sites - the main HO plus a regional office. As i said the Regional Office has a second DC there plus other servers already.

We have only one exchange server that contains all the roles - what I want to check is if the main site goes down can I simply restore a full copy of the virtual machine to the second site?

[Colin_Weaver]

What I would do is (assuming the DC is also virtual)

Backup a DC and an Exchange server using VMware agent

Restore both servers as redirections but do not start them up.

Create a virtual network within VMware that isolates these two restored servers from everything else but allows thm to talk to each other and configure them both to use this network. Then start them up (you may have to reconfigure the network cards inside both servers after they boot up.)

[ronan125]

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the update - we will try this for the DR test.

One other question - in a live scenario if our Exchange server crashed and we had to restore just the exchange server could we simply restore the backed up virtual machine to a new location.

Is this type of restore supported?

Thanks,

Ronan