Disaster Recovery - FMSO Roles

[rom1984]

I'm doing some disaster recovery planning and not sure about this and wanted to see if I could get some advise..

 

We have 2 Physical Servers running hyper-v Server 2012.

 

We have various VMs including DC01 on 1 physical server and DC02 on the 2nd physical server.

 

DC01 holds all the FMSO roles. We do a daily system state backup of DC01.

 

I'm planning on what would happen to the FMSO roles if a disaster struck that took out the physical server that hosted DC01. Lets says multiple HDD failures that meant the disks need replacing and no data could be recovered.

 

The 2 options I'm thinking off are...

 

1) Seizure of the FMSO roles and put on DC02.

OR

2) Create a new VM on the 2nd physical machine and do a AD restore onto that VM.

 

Can anyone think of any pitfalls of this or even better ways? Anyone experience this actually happen to them?

 

Cheers

RP

[Sagima]

Seize them - The only pitfall would be that you can't restore the DC that failed. Everything would be fine again in 5 minutes allowing you to set up a new DC in your own time.

 

(If it's the primary DNS server as well then make a note to change the dhcp option so that your other server gets priority)

Edited March 14, 2016 by Sagima

[DannyG555]

Do you also back up the VMs? If you happened to have another vHost could you restore the VM to it and apply the latest system state as necessary?

[rom1984]

I backup some VMs but not the DC's, because they replicate between each other I always just did a system state backup instead of backing up the VM.

 

I'm going to update my disaster recovery documentation and put that we will do a seizure to DC02 and then a meta data clean up of the old DC. I think for our setup that's looking at the best fit. Fingers crossed it never actually happens! Thanks for the replies people