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Question: What would be the best way to achieve the desired situation? RODC's?

Current situation: We have two domain controllers both with OS in RAID1 and DATA in RAID5. We also have two extra HP servers which we have to deploy as a standalone network from time to time.

When we want to deploy such a server we pull a RAID1 disk from a production DC and plug it into the server we want to deploy and let it rebuild it's RAID. For the DATA part we use a external HDD to copy the data from the production DC onto the server we want to deploy.

As you can see this is a probably not a recommended and slow way to get a server in sync with the production DC.

Desired situation: Two production DC's and two transportable DC's which are connected with the production DC's so that they keep in sync all the time, untill we disconnect them to use them in a standalone network. When the deployed servers are finished doing their standalone thing, we reconnect them back into the production network so they can sync up.

P.S.: The production DC's should always be leading for the OS and DATA part, so the server being plugged back in must NEVER overwrite any data on the production servers.

I'm happy to anwser any questions, when more information is needed.

WatskeBart
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I can think of a couple off the top:

1) Could you restore backups of your DCs to these new servers?

2) You might move to SAN storage and create a copy or just a snapshot for your standalones.

What would make a better solution, though, is going to depend: Is there anything specific you don't like about your current solution?

DrewJenseric
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  • Thanks for your reply. We could restore backups, but they are tape backups so getting the to be deployed server in sync would take even longer. I'm looking for a server hotswap plug-n-play scenario. – WatskeBart Mar 23 '17 at 18:01
  • Ah, in that case, what you're doing seems like the fastest route as long as you're okay with the RAID rebuilds and sporadic SPOFs with those disks. The SAN option, using snapshots and assigning disks via SAN, would likely be the fastest and easiest to automate. With a good SAN, you could make all of this happen at the click of a button. – DrewJenseric Mar 23 '17 at 21:36