Recovery Manager for AD Disaster Recovery Edition 10.0.1 - User Guide

Deleting domains during recovery

When recovering an Active Directory forest, you can use Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition to selectively delete particular domains from the forest being recovered. You may need to delete domains when, for example, the account you use to recover an Active Directory forest does not have sufficient permissions to access and recover some domains in the forest. In this case, you may want to sacrifice these domains and recover the forest without them.

To delete a domain from the forest being recovered, you need to set the recovery method for all DCs in that domain to Do not recover. Then, after you run the recovery operation, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition does the following:

• Deletes the domain’s partition.
• Cleans up metadata of all DCs in the domain from the forest.

To delete a domain while recovering an Active Directory forest

1. In the Forest Recovery Console, open or create a recovery project.
2. Set the recovery method for all DCs in the domain you want to delete to Do not recover:
   1. Select a DC in the list.
   2. On the Settings tab, from the Recovery method list, select Do not recover.
3. Specify other settings for your recovery project as appropriate, and then click Start Recovery on the toolbar.

Resuming an interrupted forest recovery

Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition provides the Fault Tolerance feature that allows you to resume the last forest recovery operation in case it was unexpectedly interrupted by one of these events:

• You close the Forest Recovery Console while the forest recovery operation is still running.
• The Forest Recovery Console unexpectedly shuts down partway through the forest recovery operation.
• The computer running the Forest Recovery Console powers off while the forest recovery operation is still running.

When the Fault Tolerance feature is enabled, it constantly saves the current forest recovery operation state to a dedicated SQL Server database named ForestRecovery-Persistence. Each time you start the Forest Recovery Console, a check is performed to see whether the last forest recovery operation was interrupted by any of the events listed earlier in this section. If that is true, the Forest Recovery Console prompts you to resume the forest recovery from the point at which it was interrupted.

In case you choose not to resume an interrupted forest recovery operation and select the Delete last recovery session data option in the Resume Recovery wizard, the saved session state will be permanently deleted from the ForestRecovery-Persistence database.

Permissions required to access the ForestRecovery-Persistence database

• Add an account that is used to access the ForestRecovery-Persistence database as the Security Login in SQL Server Management Studio. The public role will be automatically granted to the user account on the Server Roles tab of Login Properties.
• Add users mapped to this Login and assign the db_datareader role on the User Mapping page of the Login Properties to use the account as the Forest Recovery project reader.
• Explicitly grant the Execute right on the Permissions tab of the ForestRecovery-Persistence database Properties.This permits to use the account for the Restore operation.

For the Fault Tolerance feature, all involved console instances must have the same SSL certificate that is used to communicate with Forest Recovery Agents without using the domain access credentials.

To share the SSL certificate between console instances

1. Open or create a recovery project in Forest Recovery Console.
2. On the menu bar, select Tools | Fault Tolerance.
3. Click Export certificates... and specify the certificate file location and access credentials.
4. Save the certificate file.
5. Then, launch another instance of Forest Recovery Console.
   

   Important: Before you import the certificate file, you must uninstall Forest Recovery Agents on all domain controllers that were processed via this console, if any. For that, on the menu bar, select Tools | Manage | Forest Recovery Agent or DCs. In the dialog box that opens, select all domain controller and click the Uninstall Agent button.

6. On the menu bar, select Tools | Fault Tolerance| Import certificates..., specify the certificate file and click Open.
7. Reinstall the agents if they were uninstalled.
8. For security reasons, remove the certificate file from your computer after the Fault Tolerance feature will be configured.

To modify the fault tolerance settings for a recovery project

1. In Forest Recovery Console, select Tools | Fault Tolerance| Settings from the toolbar.
2. In the Fault Tolerance Settings dialog, use the following options:

Table 36: Recovery persistence settings

Recovering read-only domain controllers (RODCs)

Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition does not support recovering read-only domain controllers (RODCs) from backups.

The full list of recovery methods that can be applied to the RODCs in your recovery project:

• Restore SYSVOL
  This method allows you to perform the non-authoritative restore of RODCs
• Reinstall Active Directory on the RODCs
• Uninstall Active Directory from the RODCs.
• Do not recover the RODCs.

For more information on selecting a recovery method for a domain controller in the current recovery project, see Domain controller recovery settings and progress

Checking forest health

The Forest Recovery Console provides a tool that allows you to check the health of your forest. You can use the tool to run tests to ensure that domain controllers, Active Directory replication, domain trusts, user authentication, RID Master, and global catalog are working properly in your Active Directory forest.

The Forest Recovery Console automatically prompts you to check the forest health after the forest recovery has succeeded, so that you could ensure the forest works exactly the way you want. If necessary, you can manually run a health check on your forest at any time before or after the forest recovery operation.

What does Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition check?

To run a forest health check

1. Open your recovery project.
2. In the Forest Recovery Console, from the main menu, select Tools | Diagnose | Check Forest Health.
3. In the dialog box that opens, on the Settings tab, select the check boxes next to the items whose health you want to check.
4. When finished, click the Check Health button.

When the check health operation completes, use the Details tab to view information about the health of the selected items.

If you select the User authentication; RID Master and GC operation option on the Settings tab, you can specify a container for the test user account on the domain controller.

For the list of required permissions, see Recovery Manager .

To specify a container for the test user account

1. Close the Forest Recovery console.
2. Open the project (.frproj) file that was created by the Console and edit the '<Domains>' section, as shown in the following example.
   You can specify different containers for different domains.

You should specify the relative container distinguished name for the HealthCheckContainer attribute. For example, if the full DN of the container is OU=test1,DC=rmad,DC=local, specify the DN name as OU=test1.