Backing up single virtual DC

[bitmadmax]

Hi all,

 

I am responsible for running a small-ish environment of around 40 machines and a few hyper-v hosts (in addition to my full-time post in a completely unrelated profession).

 

I have recently finished migrating our physical servers to virtual ones.

 

My main concern now is backing up our one and only virtual domain controller. This is a 2012R2 guest and is running 2012 R2 forest native mode. The physical host is Hyper-V and is also 2012 R2, so everything is all the same.

 

In terms of backing up a single forest root domain controller which is a 2012R2 guest on a 2012R2 hypervisor, what is the recommended practice these days? Am I OK to shut down the VM and make a copy of the VHDX and place it onto another host if needed? or do I have to use the new "export/import" features of hyper-v 2012 R2? As I understand, in the older days you should only ever have taken a system state backup of domain controllers due to roll back issues? Is this still the case?

 

Thank you.

[Achandler]

If you not using shared storage or a cluster then personally I would have two DCs stored locally on two Virtual Hosts, purely on the basis that if one host died then the other still has a DC.

 

HyperV as a cluster needs a domain to work as far as I am aware, so if you have a cluster or shared storage then again, I would have two DCs either both stored and installed under the local admin on two different hosts, or one physical DC. Thats totally up to you. This option stil requires backups but is better for redundancy.

 

With backups, personally I do it two way, one with an offsite Data Protection manager box which is probably not needed for you, and secondly I do the old fashioned Windows backup dump to an offsite server just in case. Then I could rebuild the whole domain in theory from my offsite server.

[pbainbridge]

I'd rather have a physical 2nd DC rather than another DC on the same HyperV host otherwise its still all the eggs in one basket. The 2nd DC doesn't have to be big, any old PC or server will do, you just want something to have a copy of the schema, GPOs, DNS etc, just in case.

[Achandler]

Two DCs on Two Virtual hosts wouldn't be all the eggs in one basket though, its two DCs on different servers. It also has no effect on licensing if the hosts are licensed as Datacentre.