Forest Recovery Agent must be installed on the source computers. This is the same Forest Recovery Agent that is used by Recovery Manager for Active Directory to recover domain controllers. Forest Recovery Agent also plays a vital part in the virtual test environment creation. For example, it is used to clean up metadata, seize FSMO roles, and validate that guest OS tools are installed on the virtual machines created in the lab.
For this reason, before creating a virtual test environment, you need to ensure that each source computer has the current Forest Recovery Agent version installed. To do so, you can use the Active Directory Virtual Lab console.
When you click the Verify Settings button in Step 4: Verify virtual machine creation settings in Step-by-step instructions, the Active Directory Virtual Lab checks and displays the Forest Recovery Agent version installed on the source computers in your project. If the current version of the agent is not installed, the Active Directory Virtual Lab displays a warning. If you ignore this warning, the current agent version will be automatically installed on the source computers during the virtual test environment creation.
Alternatively, you can use the Active Directory Virtual Lab console to manually install or update the Forest Recovery Agent: just select the appropriate shortcut menu command on the source computers in the virtual lab project.
Recovery Manager for Active Directory supports only legacy ADVL projects that were created with Active Directory Virtual Lab 9.x or later.
Now Active Directory Virtual can open a legacy Virtual Lab Project (.vlproj) file if FIPS-compliant algorithms are enabled on the Active Directory Virtual Lab computer.
| Note |
To protect its data, the Active Directory Virtual Lab 9.x or later uses the SHA-1 hashing algorithm and the Triple DES encryption algorithm that are FIPS-compliant. For more information about FIPS-compliant algorithms, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 811833 “The effects of enabling the ‘System cryptography: Use FIPS compliant algorithms for encryption, hashing, and signing’ security setting in Windows XP and in later versions of Windows” at https://support.microsoft.com. |
Please consider the following precautions before creating a virtual test environment:
Virtual test environments created by the Active Directory Virtual Lab can only be used for testing, training, or evaluation purposes. Never restore or copy any data from your virtual test environments to the production Active Directory®.
Ensure your virtual test environment is properly isolated from the source Active Directory® forest. Otherwise, the source forest may be seriously damaged after you enable the network adapters in the newly-created virtual test environment.
To create a virtual test environment from an Active Directory® forest, complete these steps:
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