Forest Recovery: Recovery plan for standby forest

Content: 

Summary 

This article describes how to create, verify, and run a recovery plan for standby forest in Cayosoft Guardian.  Standby forest is a copy of the production Active Directory forest created with a scheduled process automated with Cayosoft Guardian.

With a recovery plan for standby forest, the whole standby forest update process can be performed unattendedly. A recovery plan for standby forest allows recovering a set of selected domain controllers to a pre-configured recovery site using regularly created backups of domain controllers. Such a recovery plan discovers the latest backups, automatically creates a new recovery site, performs recovery to that site, performs post-recovery health checks, and shuts down virtual machines after a successful recovery. 

If a critical event occurs, you don't need to perform full forest recovery as you already have a ready-to-use standby forest. Cayosoft Guardian allows keeping multiple recovery sites that are ready to use in case of emergency. 

 

Create a recovery plan for standby forest  

Before creating a recovery plan for standby forest:

1. Add a valid Azure subscription where Azure recovery sites will be created
2. Create a backup plan with a schedule that matches the schedule of the recovery plan you are going to create so that each time a recovery plan executes, it will be able to find new backup files 
3. Run a backup plan created at the previous step manually at least once

To create a recovery plan: 

1. Open Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal
2. Expand Forest Recovery node
3. Click on the Recovery Plans node
4. Press Add button and select Recovery plan for standby forest option
5. Select Active Directory forest to be recovered
6. Select Azure subscription
7. Select a recovery date using Recover to this point in time
8. After confirmation, Cayosoft Guardian will discover the latest backups and automatically assign these backups to each domain controller to be recovered

Configure a recovery plan for standby forest

The recovery plan consists of a list of domain controllers, domain controllers recovery settings, actions settings, and general plan settings. The values of some settings are populated from the backup automatically. 

Cayosoft Guardian automatically populates a list of domain controllers and their settings such as IP addresses, DNS-related settings, new DSRM passwords, and other settings that are required for successful recovery.  

Cayosoft Guardian also populates Recovery site settings that are necessary for recovery site creation. A recovery plan for standby forest creates a new recovery site with each run and deletes the oldest recovery site after a successful recovery.

On execution of a recovery plan for standby forest, Cayosoft Guardian checks backups validity. If backups are older than the maximum backup age, the backup plan run will be canceled.

Learn more about recovery plan settings.

 

Run a recovery plan for standby forest

To run a forest recovery plan ahead of schedule: 

1. Open Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal
2. Expand Forest Recovery node
3. Click on the Recovery Plans node
4. Open a recovery plan and press Run
5. Once the recovery process starts, Cayosoft Guardian opens the execution history record
6. Wait until recovery is complete    

After the Run button is pressed, an execution history record appears where you can observe execution steps, the current state, and the duration of each step. Each step produces detailed messages during the execution. These messages can be accessed with a click on the execution step. The Errors and warnings tab in the execution history record allows reviewing important issues related to this run.

 

Review a forest recovery plan execution results 

To review a forest recovery plan execution results:

1. Open Cayosoft Guardian Web Portal
2. Expand Forest Recovery node
3. Click on the Recovery Plans node
4. Select your recovery plan and press Properties
5. On the backup plan properties page switch to an Execution History tab
6. Find a verification execution history record, select and press Properties 
7. See execution details on the Execution and the Errors and warnings tabs