Feature request: DSRM abort

[john.brodhurst]

Having recently attended a deep dive event where we discussed Sure Backups, I was concerned that regular, automated testing of DCs almost always seems to fail for me. There may be many reasons for this but the first one is always that domain controllers always boot into DSRM and do the authoritative restore operations before becoming available for anything else. This causes Sure Backup operations to time out.

There would seem to be some imaginable cases when you would not want a DC to come up in DSRM automatically, and believe that this is primarily accomplished by modifying the BCD/boot.ini to go into DSRM. Would it be possible to have something like a tickbox-type option when restoring a VM to prevent DSRM?

[Gostev]

We tried to implement this feature in v6 and went pretty far, but cancelled this project in the end, because the testing showed that DC did not recover correctly in all cases when we made them bypass the essential recovery steps...

[tsightler]

I'd like some clarification on your issue. When running in Surebackup, assuming you've selected the proper options, the DC does perform an authoritative restore, along with a few other "tweaks" to keep the DC from waiting for other replication partners, etc. This actually works slightly differently when not in Surebackup, where it only performs a non-authoritative restore by default. I'm curious what specific issue you are attempting to address. Is it just for troubleshooting?