How to tell if backups would be recoverable after vSphere rebuild?

[ValiantMartian]

My company suddenly lost our "backup guy", and there is no DR plan to be found. So, we're scrambling to understand restore capabilities IF we had a disaster. We have about 15 Windows servers (2 of which are domain controllers). These back up to an on-premise NAS which has "Backup Copy" jobs going to a remote NAS. We ARE currently able to restore files and whole servers to our vSphere infrastructure.

HOWEVER, we're not sure if/how recovery would work in the event of a loss in our local data center where we have to completely rebuild our vSphere infrastructure. There are Veeam support articles on how to restore domain controllers, but the articles are almost 10 years old, so that scares me. Also, our local DNS and DHCP is controlled by AD, so I'm not sure what happens to all user's PCs on the network if there is no AD. I assume IP addresses would still work okay and I'd be able to get to the backup share IP such as \\192.168.5.100\VeeamBackups

If we did have a problem and officially "declared a disaster", our MSP that set up our network would be called in to help us rebuild since they know much more about vSphere/Active Directory etc. Unfortunately, they're pretty backed up for "non-disaster" work, so it may take a while to get engineers to review our setup.

So, Veeam experts, if you "inherited" this situation, what steps would you take immediately to determine if your backups are recoverable if you had to rebuild from scratch? I truly appreciate any suggestions!

[haslund]

Consider setting up a standalone ESXi host on an isolated network. Then start restoring to confirm what would be needed. You'll figure out things you already mentioned such as physical networking needs to be understood and configured, but also the virtual networking.

Could start documenting the virtual networking based of the existing ESXi hosts. Which port groups do you have? Are they in VLANs? etc.