VEB + VB&R Saved my bacon today

[kewnev]

I installed VEB on our physical domain controller about a week ago. Set it to backup to our Veeam B&R Server.

This morning, this domain controller refused to boot the OS. Somehow the disk contents had become corrupted. It was a massive relief to know that I didn't have to try and run any type of Windows diagnostics or re-install the server from scratch, thanks to VEB.

I simply extracted the Recovery Image ISO from the backup image (I had previously saved the image to the C: drive of this domain controller), booted the server with it. Pointed it to the B&R Server, and away it went. The DC was back online with very little fuss.

Thank you Veeam!!

[Vitaliy S.]

Good story, thanks for sharing!

[Gostev]

Nice!

Do you only have a single domain controller in your environment?
Also, are you running the latest VEB version, 1.1?

[kewnev]

hi Anton,

Using VEB 1.1.1.212 and VB&R 8.0.0.2030 .

We have 2 sites linked over a WAN, each site has 2 DCs : 1 x physical DC, and 1 x virtual DC.

I think the main issue we had was that DNS requests were going slow for clients. I presume what was happening is that the clients waited for a response from the (offline) DNS server, and then went to the secondary one.
I should also look at some type of DHCP Server redundancy.

[dgaccu]

Thanks for the story kewnev, we have the same setup (1 physical, 1 virtual DC) and I was doing research to see if we could use a VEB backup to our Veeam repository for the physical DC and dump ShadowProtect. I know it might not be it's official intended use but I'm glad to read that it works for DCs. Did you have to do anything special for the domain controller other than just do a simple, straight restore? Also, regarding your DHCP redundancy mention, I've been using DHCP load balancing on Server 2012 R2 and it works great.