Miguel Gonzalez

Sorry I didn’t get into the debate earlier. I did a test with clonezilla and worked fine restoring the whole drive encrypted with Bitlocker

I think I am not making myself understand.

Of course I am not expecting file based backups to work offline with Bitlocker enabled. What I mean is that I want to be abre to backup a whole drive sector by sector and be able to restore the data on the same laptop in case of DR. I assume I would use same bitlocker password all the time.

In case of drive breaks I want to be able to buy a new drive and restore the whole drive sector by sector.

I tried live CD from Acronis and it didn’t work even unlocking (not disabling) bitlocker as mentioned on their docs.

I am going to try clonezilla and I wanted to know experiences from people here.

I hope now I make myself more clear of the assumptions I know and what I try to accomplish here.

Thanks for answering so quickly.

I know all that. I was assuming that I could backup sector by sector as DR backup. Clonezilla claims it can do it.

Of course I am working on testing DR and a procedure before going on production.

I was just giving the whole picture and try to generate a debate and get some inputs.

Regenerating bitlocker passwords for DR every month or quarter I find it a little bit time consuming and error prompt

Thanks

Well, I have spent more than a week trying to set up the free Starwind tool. It´s a nightmare to configure. I ended up having a broken configuration and removing the tool in the hyper-v server core

I am trying to configure a server core 2016 with iSCSI Target Server feature on to see if it´s much easier to setup. I tried to install the FS-iscsitarget-server feature on the Hyper-V server core 2016 but apparently it´s not included (fs-fileserver is, though)

Any other free and easier alternative to Starwind?

Yes, I have a laptop running Windows 10 and I enable nested virtualization with Hyper-V 2016 core. In each of those Hyper-V guest hyper-V hosts I have installed Starwind Free as you suggested.

My main idea is to test a DC, CA, Exchange and probably SQL Server and Sharepoint. The cluster tests are only related to a Backup tool that I am testing that has a Hyper-V cluster agent  so that´s why I don´t need something very complicated. Maybe in the future I will need other stuff related to hyper-V clusters, but I don´t foresee any for the time being.

One of the benefits I have seen so far is that I have never used hyper-V core versions before and I find them very easily to manage and with the great benefit of a low footprint.

Thanks! I figured it out myself using the powershell scripts Create_HA.ps1 that come with the tool

Just wondering. Would it be an alternative to use VHD sets instead of using Starwind? Will I miss any feature? I am just trying to build a laptop lab and I don´t want to overcomplicate things. I see Starwind free installation is a little bit cumbersome. In fact after playing around a bit I managed to create modifying the createHa_2.ps1 file a disk shared in the cluster but I did something wrong because one of the two servers see the disk and the other sees the disk as read-only.

yes! It  worked like a charm! It made totally sense…I don´t know why I didn´t figure it out 🙂

Nice! I have installed a Hyper-V 2016 Core server and i can manage it from my Windows 10 laptop.

I have installed the StarWinds console on my laptop but when I connect to the hyper-v host It says the free license doesn´t support GUI (I used the same license key that I got from my free download).

On the manual you have sent me it says I can connect from a Starwinds console. Do you have any idea of how to solve this?

Miguel

Thank you for getting back! We haven´t turned on the servers yet. Hopefully everything will go fine as you said 🙂

Many thanks for answering so quickly!

The issue here is that the OU will get back to the domain after 2-3 months, so creating a different domain and make them to trust each other is not on the table.

The issue here is that the servers are being relocated to a new site that has to be finished. We are thinking of two choices here:

• Keep the machines turned off until the OU can be connected and restore trust.
• Turn them on (that´s why the question arised) as soon as we are able to have the new data center ready even when IS NOT connected to the rest of the OUs of our domain. The idea is to turn them on from time to time to apply manually WSUS updates.

From my point of view I´d choose the first option but we are pondering the benefits of installing critical updates, that´s when we think of the second choice and its drawbacks.

Does it make sense now?