Veeam quick migration for domain controller

[MGT1981]

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if I could get some guidance for a scenario.

We currently have a VMware cluster that has several hosts with no local storage attached to an old ecologic sand we are migrating these VMS to host with local disks as a stopgap until we get to our cloud infrastructure over the next year or so.

We have successfully storage vmotion'd all but one server. That server is a 10 TB file server that is also a domain controller (yeah I know). I'm considering using the quick migration for this but I'm not quite sure how it plays with domain controllers from the standpoint of USN rollback. Also what happens in the off chance that there's a power outage in the middle of a Veeam quick migrate? Unfortunately a temporary demotion of the Jamaican troller is not really viable at this point for reasons that are too complex to get into here.

I'm just weighing doing this versus continuing using storage fee motion and just letting it run for a day and trying to determine what the safest method is.

Also is the secondary question does veeam cdp work with domain controllers? Any gotchas from an active directory replication standpoint?

[HannesK]

Hello,
if storage VMotion worked for all other VMs, I would do the same for the domain controller.

If you want to use quick migration, then that's okay. Quick migration suspends the VM. No rollback at all.

You can also just power-off the machine if you like.

All methods are above are safe.

CDP is crash-consistent most of the time (like a storage replication). Application awareness (which prevents USN rollback with full-VM restores / failovers) is possible. I would not use any kind of replication for domain controllers in general. It's built-in AD. If the CDP question is about the migration: I would use classic replication with planned failover. But the first three options are also fine.

Best regards,
Hannes

PS: modern Windows server versions have a way to prevent USN rollback in case of snapshot restore