Bare metal recovery of a Server 2016 Domain Controller

[ralfm]

Case # 03175123:
The Veeam support requested me to push our experience here - actually there is no stable restore solution for active directory services controller:
I restored in a first run a backup of a Sever2016 with DC(Microsoft active directory services controller) function successfully on a different test hardware.
The behaviour is a follows: after the restore the restored server starts, but the DC-services are not running, then I wait some minutes and the server restarts automatically - after the 2nd reboot the Server starts with all DC services properly, but as described this occurred only once !
I tried the same restore with the same backup source(tried an incremental restore in the meantime which failed, so I planed to test the first process again) some hours later and it fails - after the second reboot the server crashes with an error screen creating a log file with the error message 0xc0002e2, which is related to the directory services. What I not understand is, why was there only one successful restore possible with the same backup source, environment and with the same process?
Later I made a boot into the 'doman controller repair mode' and made a repair as Microsoft suggestes. After this process the DC was up and running properly so far.
The Veeam support suggested to use the option 'application awreness' in the backup client - but there is no option for the DC database, what is not Oracle or MS SQL. I made a new backup with this option, but there is no difference - the restored new backup boots first without DC services, some minutes later an automatic reboot occurs.
In a summary - the VEEAM-backup client is not able to provide a stable restore when a server is a domain controller. You have to hope, that the server is running properly after the second reboot, otherwise you have to do a repair of the DC database - hopefully successful.
So I hope the VEEAM developers can provide a solution that works for these cases.

[ThomasR]

Unfortunatly there are so many non answers from veeam regarding Active directory backup. Can we just have one simple yes or no. Is veeam for windows free able to backup an active directory server or not??

[Dima P.]

Hi folks,

Case # 03175123: The Veeam support requested me to push our experience here - actually there is no stable restore solution for active directory services controller:

Asked QA team to review your case. Stay tuned.

Can we just have one simple yes or no. Is veeam for windows free able to backup an active directory server or not??

Yes it can take image level backup of the machine with AD on board. Keep in mind that the recommended why would be to use Veeam Agent for Windows Server edition with application aware processing enabled.