Hi,
I've just moved to VDR 1.2 from using older VCB scripts and am doing my recovery documentation. Assuming our whole environment is down, our first step is to recover a new host, then a DC with DNS/DHCP/AD etc, then the vCenter server and DB server.
My first thought was to recover all this from VDR backups.
Your main question was about VSS etc... VDR will do this as long as you have the VMtools installed as it is VSS aware and will quesce the VM, so all is good doing AD, SQL or Exchange (VSS aware apps.)
- - - Note, if you're recovering all of your DCs from image backups, you must power on your last backed up DC all the way to the first backed up one.so that each powered on DC is progressively older and AD can 'catch up' or else you'll have a multi-headded AD enviornment where no DCs are talking with each other. = BAD NEWS.
The bit you haven't mentioned yet is how do you do a VDR recovery if you have no environment (aka total disaster)? VDR REQUIRES vCenter to even begin to do its first restore. So it's all well and good to be able to do a successful backup of your vCenter infrastructure, but you'll be unable to recover it using VDR!
You'll need to use separate Converter (it seems they've removed the built in Converter from vCenter, so you'll need to use the Stand-alone version) compatable recovery tool (such as BESR - Backup Exec System Recovery) to do image backups of your DCs and vCenter infrastructure.
Once that's up and running you can then use VDR to recover the rest of your virtual environment.
Basically, that's what we do.
Good luck!
