veeam backup active directory best practices

We can just target an ESXi host via IP address within Veeam vSphere: Does vCenter manage the ESXi hosts via FQDN entries or IP addresses? If it’s via FQDN, you’ll be best avoiding using vCenter within Veeam for your recovery as you’d have to mess with your VCSA to avoid the DNS issues.We need to consider the impact from a few perspectives: Lets go over a few basic parts to this and build a strategy for you:įirstly, you’ve quite rightly highlighted your DNS will be impacted. I got more than one long winded lecture from sales about how I don't know how hard it is to win these sales, once even literally explaining how his kid needed new clothes for school and this is how he bought them.Veeam would be terrible backup software if you couldn’t recover your AD environment, so the answer is a definite YES! Sales knew they were guilty of pushing a shit long-term outcome to win a sale from some cheapskate SMB customer by letting them penny pinch. On more than one occasion I would piss off sales and frighten customers by asking the salesman in project kickoff calls if there was an error in the SoW because the second DC wasn't listed. When I worked in consulting, we used to have epic battles with sales when sales would let small customers cut corners and not buy licensing for a second DC.

The actual backup of a DC really seems to matter most when you literally only have one DC for the entire domain or forest.

If I've lost a role holder DC, that's something more of an issue but I've never had issues using the builtin mechanism for seizing the role on another DC. If a DC without any operational master roles has serious problems, I can always forcibly remove it from AD and replace it with a newly promoted server. I generally find that a better total strategy is multiple DCs. Probably pretty influential here is thinking about the use cases of restoring a single AD DC from a backup that wasn't within the last ~24 hours and what kinds of synchronization issues you could run into when a DC out of sync for days or longer comes back online into a multi-server AD domain or forest.

Veeam backup active directory best practices