DC’s and VM’s – Avoiding the Do-Over

Ask the Directory Services Team : DC's and VM's ??? Avoiding the Do-Over | ServersArea.Com

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:09:00 GMT

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re: DC’s and VM’s – Avoiding the Do-Over

pagy — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:03:32 GMT

Good article.

Yeah, seeing this popping up in forums a lot recently. I'll just link to this article from now on in my reply to those posts :)

re: DC’s and VM’s – Avoiding the Do-Over

MarcP — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:27:04 GMT

Important reference, bookmarked :-)

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re: DC’s and VM’s – Avoiding the Do-Over

hilde — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:09:44 GMT

All - great info. However, in MSFT's VS 2005 whitepaper about running DCs on VMs, there is mention of a regchange (notice I didn't say 'reghack') that

prevents USN rollback:

1. Using the previous .vhd, start the domain controller in Directory Services Restore mode.

2. In a registry editor, if the entry DSA Previous Restore Count under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters is visible, make a note of the value. If the entry is not visible, assume a value of 0. Do not add the entry.

3. Add the registry entry Database restored from backup under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters

Data type: REG_DWORD

Value=1

Is that no longer valid?

re: DC’s and VM’s – Avoiding the Do-Over

NedPyle — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:32:10 GMT

That is not supported, because it is being used to circumvent a proper backup. It's hacking. Using snapshots with any virtualization technology and a DC is 100% unsupported, always.

That article was clearly written back when people were cowboying virtualization because they had no idea what they were doing, and the author clearly did not either. 5 years ago, sounds about right. Don't use that article and expect to be supported if you have DC issues afterwards.