Hey,

I don't have many experience on this. But personally, I think use VSS and the bare metal restore functionality maybe better. If the DC is crashed totally, you can use bare metal restore functionality to resolve the issue.

Hope this can help you.

Well I have never had to recreate a DC , but I have cloned, and rebuilt windows servers from a VM backup with no issues.

We restore our DC to our test network and at our disaster recovery site so we have a copy of our current AD available in these environments. In the past it was not recommended to restore a DC from a VM image backup. I wasn't sure if that's still the case and if people have had success doing this with Avamar.

At present, it is doable to backup windows DC which is a VM certainly using vm image backup and do restore from it directly.

As long as it's a vm, you are good to make an image backup. On the other hand, if it's a physical machine, i still suggest you go bare metal backup to restore the OS and AD system data.

So I've decided the BMR and VSS method is the best way to restore my Windows 2008 R2 DC (for various reasons). The original VSS backup was configured with "Create Disaster Recovery Backup" checked.

I restored the DC using the BMR and rebooted. When I rebooted AD wasn't functioning. I thought I need to restore the AD data from the VSS backup so I followed the documentation for v7.x and tried to run the restore. The restore failed with the message

 avvss Error <0000>: Disaster Recovery backup is being used for online restore of system state. This functionality is not supported, exiting..

Obviously I'm doing something wrong. The documentation says that I should be able to select only "Active Directory" from the "BootableSystemState" backup but I can't. I have to select all of "BootableSystemState".

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this restored?

Thanks.

Active Directory can only be restored from a non-DR backup. From the Avamar 7.0 for Windows Server User Guide (emphasis mine):

Active Directory data backups To back up Active Directory data in preparation for disaster recovery, perform regular System State backups of the domain controllers: On a Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008 computer, use the Windows VSS plug-in to perform the backup. When you perform the backup, clear the Create Disaster Recovery Backup checkbox on the Options tab. When you clear the checkbox, you can only use the backup for online restore, not BMR.

A VSS System State backup can only be used to perform either bare metal restore or Active Directory restore. If you wish to perform both types of restore, you will need to create two VSS backups of the DC (one with the Disaster Recovery checkbox checked for BMR and one with it unchecked for AD restore).

As a rule, I wouldn't bother with bare metal recovery of Domain Controllers -- if Microsoft best practices are being followed, there is nothing of value on a Domain Controller except the Active Directory database anyway.

Ok so now I have a Windows File System, Windows VSS (Create Disaster Recovery Backup checked), Windows VSS (Create Disaster Recovery Backup unchecked). I followed the Avamar documentation and restored the server through the bare metal restore wizard and then followed the directions to restore AD from my VSS backup (disaster recovery backup unchecked) ran through ntdsutil to perform the authoritative restore by restoring object DC=mydomain,DC=com and rebooted. After the reboot it looks like AD is still not available.

What am I missing?

Thanks.

If you followed the instructions on page 27 of the Windows Server User Guide (https://support.emc.com/docu48232_Avamar-7.0-for-Windows-Server-User-Guide.pdf?language=en_US) and were not able to successfully restore your Active Directory data, I would recommend opening a service request.