BESR 2010 - Backing up/Recovering Active directory in a SBS network

[BEERMONSTER]

Hi

I currently have a dual site office which consists of a Small Business server 2003 and a backup DC at site 1 and 2 DC's at site 2.

The Domain controllers are all running Server 2003 R2 standard edition and the SBS is also R2 Standard.

All the DC's are running in a virtual environment (Hyper-V at site1 and Virtual Server 2005 SP1 at site 2)

At the moment, I backup all the DC's and the SBS from within the guests using BESR 2010, and all seems to backup fine.  However, I cannot find any guides for restoring one of these servers should a failure occur.  I have read the best practices guide, but it doesn't tell you how to perform a restore.  Do I need to perform a granular restore or normal restore or lights out restore.

Is it just a case of mounting the recovery CD to the guest and performing a recovery from backup?  Will the DC's or SBS be aware that it has been recoverd from a backup and request and update from the other DC's with causing a USN rollback?

My second question is around backing up the host server at each site.  BESR is VSS aware for Hyper-v and Virtual Server 2005.  If I was to perfom a backup/restore of the host, would recovering the VHD files of the guests put the DC/SBS into a "recovered from backup state" again preventing a USN rollback.

Non of these seems very clear in the documentation I have read so far, so would like to clarify the correct steps should the need to recover one of these servers ever arise.  Any links to documents/ step by step idiot proof guides would be a great help.

Regards

Andy

[BEERMONSTER]

So can nobody help with this??  Not even the symantec employees??

[JustinY]

Hi Andy,

I feel your pain here. These forums look like they are just there for fellow Symantec users to try help each other out. If you want answers, you have to contact support through https://mysupport.symantec.com which in my opinion isn't the greatist of support.

I suggest you get hold of a spare basic server to test your DR plan as you may find yourself up the creek without a paddle ;) I've been doing just that and haven't be able to bring the server to production state (without having to rejoin every client to the domain).

Regards,

Justin