DR Strategy for DCs

[gingerdazza]

Was just wondering what strategy people generally use for failover between primary and DR sites for their AD DCs, using Veeam replicas. Unlike most types of VMs, DCs need extra love! Interested to know whether people normally deploy DCs in both primary and DR sites (hot) and NEVER bring up replicas of DCs from primary in the DR site, or whether people do replicate their DCs to DR and fail them over?

And would I be right in suggesting that the VM-Generation support for 2012 domains has improved the use case for DC replicas a little in such scenarios?

To me, right now, keeping hot DCs in a DR site and NOT replicating the primary-site DCs to DR makes a little more sense - well, seems less risky anyway from an AD consistency perspective at least.

Thanks

[Mike Resseler]

Hi,
As always, it depends a bit on your situation. For sure I would say that having a hot DC on a standby or DR site is a good idea. However, that doesn't take away you need to think of a DR strategy for your DC's anyway. There can still be corruption or a bad delete and it will be replicated before you can drink your coffee

So having a replica is one thing, but make sure you can roll back to a certain point in time, and my favorite would be, take a regular backup to your DR site and replicate from that backup.

Mike

[gingerdazza]

Of course. DR/Backup is non negotiable! My primary question here is about site failover for DCs....

1. Replicate DCs, and power up on site failover
or
2. Distribute hot DCs in all sites, and leave failed site DCs behind in a failover scenario

Any others have input on their thoughts and own strategies?

[Mike Resseler]

As I said, my preference goes to a hot DC but it comes with a cost. If you are willing to pay that (small) cost (electricity / management of an additional VM) then I would go for it.

[gingerdazza]

I'm pretty sure that using replicas is not supported anyway unless you have 2012 DCs and a VM-Generation supporting hyper visor. With 2008 DCs, the only cold site failover DR that I can think would be supported, would be an AD rebuild from system state backup - yuk!

[Mike Resseler]

Dazza,

Good point, I kind of automatically went from the idea that it would be a 2012 DC at least but that is not always the case. Thanks for bringing it up!