Hello
all.
I'm a longtime lurker, and very infrequent poster. I take
the advice of this group to heart and apply it regularly every
day. This might be slightly off topic post, but I'm curious how you
perform disaster recovery testing on your Exchange
environment.
We are a
medium-sized part of a very large company. Our local site hosts a 2003
Domain Controller for the North American domain and the Exchange 2003 server for
our local users. My coworker and I are Domain Admins for North
America, but not for the root domain, and not for the forest. We are also
Exchange admins for our server, but not the entire Exchange organization.
We are attempting to test
our Disaster Recovery Plan for our Exchange server. One of our
success criteria is to not interfere with Production email or users. To
this end, we created a separate network that has no connection to
our Production network and moved a Production DC for the NA domain onto
this network. Although we have been able to get DNS resolution to work
from this DC, AD authentication is not working and we cannot join any of our
Test network servers to the domain hosted by it. So far the recovery is
going no where.
Back in the good ole
days, we could have restored Exchange 5.5 independent of our domain, whether it
was NT 4.0 or Active Directory. Also, if this was a true disaster, the
recovery would be simpler since we would have access to the Production
network. Because of our success criteria of not interfering with
Production, we are in this limbo where we have to have some Production data
(represented in the DC and GC) to restore Exchange, but we don't have
access to the entire forest or Exchange org since the Test has to be
on a separate network.
I curious if any of
you have encountered this issue before and how you got around it. Building
a separate Test forest on a separate Test network that mimics Production is not
out of the question, but it would require much more support and cooperation from
the corporate levels above us to complete. This is something that would
probably take months to setup in our company. Are we missing something
basic?
Thanks in advance
for all of your help.
jasonjordan MCSE,
MCP+I, MCP
Manager
Security, Audit, and
Recovery Team
Data
Center Services
Emerson
Process Management, LLLP
