Disaster Recovery And Dc

[supportguy]

Hi,

I am currently reviewing Disaster recovery processes and backup servers. I am looking at putting a mirrored copy of our DC off site at another office. If i connect the DC up on the existing infrastructure at the other office, will this cause networking issues for them? I would assign it a new IP address etc but would hope to leave all other settings on the server as they are (if possible)

We are running SBS2008 at present, and would be using backupassist to replicate the data off site to the backup server. Is this something fairly straight forward to implement?

I have a gerneral Idea of how this should be done, and what needs to be implemented. I just thought i would ask the questions above to rule out any concerns or get feedback on my proposed ideas.

Thanks

 

[mmthomas]

Are you trying to save information on this server other than the Active Directory information? If not, it seems like it would be far easier to simply create a second domain controller and use active directory replication to update the info. If you don't have an always on WAN link to the office, you could occasionally VPN from one DC to the other and replicate, or set up a demand-dial vpn connection.

If you're set on a mirror, you're going to need to have the backup server off your network or it will cause problems. You might be able to put it in its own VLAN so that it can't talk to any other machines on the network and that would resolve some issues. But it would make sense to me to just make a secondary domain controller in the other office and then routinely copy over any other non-AD data on that server that you think you may need.