Your Active Directory currently contains five virtualized domain controllers that run Windows
Server 2012 R2.
The system state of each domain controller is backed up daily. The backups are shipped to
a remote location weekly.
Your company recently implemented a disaster recovery site that contains several servers.
The servers run Windows Server 2012 R2 and have the Hyper-V server role installed. The
disaster recovery site has a high-speed WAN link to the main office.
You need to create an Active Directory recovery plan that meets the following requirements:
Restores the Active Directory if a catastrophe prevents all access to the main office.
Minimizes data loss.
What should you include in the plan?
A.
Hyper-V replicas
B.
Live migration
C.
Virtual machine checkpoints
D.
System state restores
yet another funny answer
in case of catastrophe it will be no access to main site at all.
Live migration is not possible because there is no AD DCs at main site.
From my opinion best solution is configure additional recovery points of DCs. Recovery points are snapshots saved on replica server every 5 up to 15 minutes. RPO is quite good.
Recovery points is part of the “Enable Replication” wizard in Hyper-V manager.
The answer should be A.
Dear Wojtek, may be in general you are right but it seems that MS expect from us to use system state backups. Thus, if we have this backups we can install new DC’s on disaster recovery site and to restore AD from backup. For me the best sollution is to have Domain Controllers in remote location which replicate with primary site, but in this case we should consider answer D.
Thanks for the explanation. I thought too much about HA.
After additional research and reading I realize that I was not right. It is possible to use Hyper-V Replicas in this case – requirements are to use at least MS Server 2012 as DC and VMHost. More info – here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn250021.aspx
The key here is ‘minimise data loss’. While option D seems attractive, bear in mind backup of system state is taken daily. So say backup is taken at 12am daily, if the DC fails at 6pm or 8pm, then you can only restore system state to the last backup which is 12am which means up to 6 to 8 hours data lost.
Now compared this to Option A – hyper V replica sends asynchronous updates every 5 minutes to the replica DC VM which means data loss could only be what has changed between the last update. I’ll go with A as the correct answer.
@ Chris – Also worth mentioning that it states “The backups are shipped to
a remote location weekly”. In which case the data loss could be even greater !!
Also remember that in R2 we have the option to set 30 second replication frequency
http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2013/10/22/what-s-new-in-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx
A seems BEST answer for requirements