We are testing our DR. Since we are in earthquake country se decided to see what would happen if we could not restore to the production server or a similar box.
Instead we restored to a optiplex workstation.
first off:
The restore of 2003 +sbs +the ASR seemed to go fine.
Upon rebooting the machine, everything looked normal. Until we got the first error. "Exchange server cannot load because there is no domain" What we were expecting is that exchange could not load because of no data (haven't restored the database yet.)
So We opened up active directory users and computers and go the error that no domain could be found.
Right clicking on the Active directory at the top of the snap-in we choose find domain controller "spark" active directory then loaded all the users and computers/domain controllers.
But still exchange server could not find the domain. Now WE KNOW THAT EXCHANGE WILL NOT START without the database, but when we rebooted, the Active Directory errored out again that no domain was available until we repeated the above steps.
Even when we did the above steps, when we went back to the manager snap-in no users /computers could be found....
Any ideas?
Sure enough, going into the server manager snap-in it appeared that no users were there, etc.
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Found out a partial fix.
By restarting the DNs server then the DNS client and then netlogon services, the domain was recognized and loaded with users and computers.
However, when the machine is rebooted, the whole process must be done again /dns server, client/ netlogon -
Any ideas on how to make it stable?
This may not be of any help to you now, but I also found when restoring an SBS 2003 server to different hardware, the DNS server service wasn't initially running properly. Restarting the service, as you have mentioned, fixed our DNS related issues.
Does the DC look to it's own DNS server service for resolution? If so, that's why it Exchange can't find the domain. While ASR got our server back up and limping on different hardware, I only found that it was stable once the ASR backup was then supplemented with a system partition/system state restore from our backup software, in our case Backup Exec. Once these restores were done, everything was stable.
ASR on it's own isn't a full system restore. Although supplementing it with another backup set slows things down at least you've managed to transfer the OS to different hardware which can't be done with a standard backup.
Acronis is better though (if more expensive!).
I've been playing with ASR and SBS also. You might want to check to see if your SYSVOL and NETLOGON are shared. After a restore to different hardware using ASR, mine were not so I was having Active Directory problems.
See if this helps you out. http://support.microsoft.c
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by: ssparks827Posted on 2008-11-24 at 15:12:40ID: 23031336
I would suggest using acronis or some type of software that will allow for moving from hardware types. The only other way in the DR fashion you are trying is to restore using the sbs disc1 and then do the option for restoring AD mode. Then use nt backup to restore everything else. I personally prefer using Acronis to do these type of DR restores. It's easy and it seems to allows work.