What does the Forest Edition require for name resolution? How does the product communicate if DNS (4231710)

What does the Forest Edition require for name resolution? How does the product communicate if DNS is unavailable?

I tried to perform a forest recovery in my VM environment and it consistently failed on a single DC in the forest. I isolated the problem to the DNS server not being available. When performing a forest recovery DNS is required to find the target servers, to tell the agents to perform a restore of the DC's system state from backup. If DNS is not up and running, the recovery appears to fail.