Snapping Production AD to the Test Lab

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hi,

Does anyone have any good approaches to snapping production Windows 2000 SP4
Active Directory to production? This is something that would significantly
help with testing against production in the lab without affecting production.
The only approach I can think of is to restore system state against a
freshly built member server which could be a sysprep image to save time.
Does anyone have a better approach?

Thanks,

Joe Wilson
 
Assuming you have a single domain forest..........

There are really three approaches that I can think of.
You already mentioned one....system state restore.

You could also temporarily down one of your DCs (a GC), and create a ghost
image of it.

The third method, and the recommended one IMHO, is to bring up a new DC in
your production domain and promote it to GC status. Then take this GC, and
put it into the isolated lab network. seize all 5 FSMOs, then cleanup the
directory of the origininal DCs. KB216498

You will also need to cleanup this DC from your production domain using
KB216498

If you have multiple domains, this third option is more complicated.
 
I like yours and there is (at least one more):

Mirror, break it, remove the disk and put it into the lab machine.
Or just dupe the drive (probably with Linux boot CD)

The key, is you just make a DC one way or another and take
it offline to the lab. Give it the missing roles, GC, set up
DNS, etc.

If the other DCs know about it, then you probably have to
remove it from AD using NTDSUtil.
 
Back
Top