W2K Disaster Recovery

[romecoyle]

Hi All,

I'm looking into creating a disaster recovery "cookbook" for Win2k and would like to make it as automated as possible. I know that 2003/XP have ASR (Automated System Recovery)but we still have a significant amount of 2k in our environment and I was looking for what might have worked great for other people. I'm talking about a DR from dead hardware. What we're currently doing is a complete rebuild of the operating system which works well but is more interactive than I'd like...so if anyone has any great (free) automated solutions, I'd love to hear them.

Thx,
Rome

 

[Andreh]

You question is very broad. Last week I was involved with a customer who is migrating from a Novell Groupwise / Win2k environment that is migrating to Exchange 2003. As a part of that we needed to prove that we could recover AD to a DR sort of scenario.

This posed a couple of different questions:
Is AD 2000 or 2003?
How much allowable down time can your business afford? (SLA very important and core to the DR design)
Do you want to restore AD?
Do you want this to different hardware?
Do you want this from a Physical environment to a Virtual if needed (very complicated) recovery?
Do you want a Virtual to Virtual recovery?
Do you keep updated copies of ERD disks of servers you wish to recover (Found to be extremely important in P > V)
What services for the network do you wish to recover or rebuild if needed?

Etc..

As you can see, there are quite a few scenarios each with their own methods to recovery; hence the reason for saying your question is broad. Have a think about what I have stated and identify what is relevant to you. From the experience I have had recently, this is definitely something at you need to practice and be comfortable with. Then you will be able increase the efficiency and automation of the process.

Good luck


"Assumption is the mother of all f#%kups!