The first step of any site disaster recovery (DR) is the recovery of the domain controller.\u00a0\u00a0 This server holds all the user and service accounts and controls the rest of the servers.\u00a0 Without it, the entire IT infrastructure won’t really work.\u00a0You will find by now that it is a chicken and egg situation; you need an operational domain controller to restore the backup copy. Hence rule number 1<\/p>\n
1. Always have a working domain controller at an off site location. Off site does mean the other office on the 12th floor or Tower B. Off site means literally another office in another city block or another suburb.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 If there is a large fire, the police will cordon off and evacuate all persons within the affected property.<\/p>\n
You do not need to buy a spanking new top of the line server for this.\u00a0\u00a0 Just a physically secured PC will do. During normal functions, this server is working as a cache.\u00a0 If there are users at the same site, it will help to authenticated them.\u00a0 In the event of a disaster, it will be the queen bee to create more domain controllers.<\/p>\n
If the organization is a small single site outfit, consider having the off site domain controller located in your cubicle.\u00a0 Do not use your work PC as a domain controller.\u00a0 Otherwise any virus infection or operational mistake will knock out your whole organization.<\/p>\n
If the off site has sufficient space to be a DR data center, that would be excellent.\u00a0 If not, you need to go over there, get the doors open and alarms disabled, cart the PC to your DR data center.<\/p>\n
There are now new technologies to make your life easier.\u00a0 Consider the options:<\/p>\n
1. Disaster Recovery restore option from Backup Exec\u00a0<\/a> or\u00a0 Arcserve<\/a>.\u00a0 These products works best when the target server\u00a0hardware is the same as the source server. If you have this, you will need to keep the required boot CD up to date.\u00a0 You will also need to test this after any hotfix or service pack update of the backup software.<\/p>\n 2. Virtualization. It is possible to operate one of the production domain controller as a virtual or guest.\u00a0 For day to day backup, just backup the entire fire image or vmdk file.\u00a0 All you need to restore is just this set of files and you are good to go.\u00a0 There are some issues to consider.<\/p>\n How is the backup performed and how you plan to restore.\u00a0 If you are\u00a0going to use FTP to save on the necessary software options to talk to the virtual hosts,\u00a0remember to add some alerts so that you know that it is working.<\/p>\n