Best Practice for 2008R2 DC off site backup

hello.
at the request of the management i am trying to finalize a plan that covers off different potential events that could afflict our domain controllers.
we currently have 2 DC's in our environment 1 holds all FSMO so we have redundancy if 1 goes down and i can use DC promo to build a new one and add it to the domain, then doing meta data clean up if needed.
i have system state backups which will be useful if something happens to AD and i still have the original hardware to restore onto.
however if something horrific happens i lose both dc's and need to restore to new hardware i am dubious of the reliability of these system state backups as i have tested them in the past and often got BSOD issues.
i toyed with the idea of have a 3rd DC hosted off site in a data center, have replication occur to this and then i could use to rebuild new ones onsite if such a disaster were to occur.
any one have any suggestions or ideas on this one, or speak from there own experiences in this subject
Many Thanks

Having a off-site DC is always good, but in the event of a replicated failure it's not going to help, there is situations where you would need to do a forest recovery (for example backing out of a schema update) Then you need to restore a system state
backup of one DC and preferably re-install the others.
Enfo Zipper
Christoffer Andersson – Principal Advisor
http://blogs.chrisse.se - Directory Services Blog

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Hi,
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Hi Brian,
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SRST Fallback
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http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6788/vcallcon/ps2169/prod_qas0900aecd8028d113.html
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/* Server Support Specialist */

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Site #1
DC-01 - NIC IP address for DNS server #1 set to 10.0.0.8, DNS server #2 set to 127.0.0.1 (should I add my 2nd sites DNS servers under Advanced as well? 10.2.0.7 & 10.2.0.8)
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DC-01 - NIC IP address for DNS server #1 set to 10.2.0.8, DNS server #2 set to 127.0.0.1 (should I add my 2nd sites DNS servers under Advanced as well? 10.0.0.7 & 10.0.0.8)
DC-02 - NIC IP address for DNS server #1 set to 10.2.0.7, DNS server #2 set to 127.0.0.1 (should I add my 2nd sites DNS servers under Advanced as well? 10.0.0.7 & 10.0.0.8)
Under the DNS management > Forward Lookup Zones > _msdcs.mydomain.local
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Under the DNS management > Forward Lookup Zones > _msdcs.mydomain.local > properties > General > Type should all servers be set to
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Secondary Zone?
Under the DNS management > Forward Lookup Zones > _msdcs.mydomain.local > properties > Zone Transfers should I allow zone transfers?
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I am curious if someone can help me with best practices for my DNS servers. Let me give my network layout first.
I have 1 site with 2 x Windows 2012 Servers (1 GUI - 10.0.0.7, the other CORE - 10.0.0.8) the 2nd site connected via VPN has 2 x Windows 2012R2 Servers (1 GUI - 10.2.0.7, the other CORE - 10.2.0.8) All 4 servers are promoted to DC's and have DNS services
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Would the following questions be identical to the Forward Lookup Zone mydomain.local as well?
Site1
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DC2: Primary 10.2.0.8. Secondary 10.2.0.7. Tertiary 127.0.0.1
The DC's should automatically register in msdcs. Do not register external DNS servers in msdcs or it will lead to issues. Yes, I recommend all zones to be set to AD-integrated. No need to allow zone transfers as AD replication will take care
of this for you. Same for mydomain.local.
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Consider paying more for good hardware. Computers have almost become commodities, and price shopping abounds, but there are some areas where spending a few dollars more can be beneficial. For example, the difference in price between a top-of-the-line high performance enterprise class hard drive and the cheapest model around with, say, a 1 TB capacity is less than a hundred bucks! Disk drives do fail! They're not all created equal. What would it cost you in aggravation and time to lose your data? Imagine it happening at the worst possible time, because that's exactly when failures occur.
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Work locally, copy files elsewhere. Photoshop likes to be run on files on the local hard drive(s). If you are working in an environment where you have networking, rather than opening a file right off the network, then saving it back there, consider copying the file to your local hard drive then working on it there. This way an unexpected network outage or error won't cause you to lose work.
Never save over your original files. You may have a library of original images you have captured with your camera or created. Sometimes these are in formats that can be re-saved. If you're going to work on one of those files (e.g., to prepare it for some use, such as printing), and it's a file type that can be overwritten (e.g., JPEG), as soon as you open the file save the document in another location, e.g., in Photoshop .psd format.
Save your master files in several places. While you are working in Photoshop, especially if you've done a lot of work on one document, remember to save your work regularly, and you may want to save it in several different places (or copy the file after you have saved it to a backup folder, or save it in a version management system). Things can go wrong and it's nice to be able to go back to a prior saved version without losing too much work.
Make Backups. Back up your computer files, including your Photoshop work, ideally to external media. Windows now ships with a quite good backup system, and external USB drives with surprisingly high capacity (e.g., Western Digital MyBook) are very inexpensive. The external drives aren't that fast, but a backup you've set up to run late at night can finish by morning, and if/when you have a failure or loss of data. And if you're really concerned with backup integrity, you can unplug an external drive and take it to another location.
This stuff is kind of "motherhood and apple pie" but it's worth getting the word out I think.
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Hello!
Current Cisco best practice recommendations for enterprise MediaNet design, specify that VLANs be local to a switch / switch stack (i.e., to limit the scope of spanning-tree).
In the wireless world, this causes problems if you want users while roaming to keep real-time applications up and running. Every time they connect to a new AP on a different VLAN, then they will need to get a new IP address, which interrupts real-time apps.
So...best practice for LAN users causes real problems for wireless users.
I thought I'd post here in case there's a best practice for implementing wireless roaming in a routed environment that we might have missed so far!
We have a failover pair of FlexConnect 7510s, btw, configured for local switching for Internal users, and central switching with an anchor controller on the DMZ for Guest users.
Thanks,
Deb

Thanks for your replies, Stephen and JSnyder.
The situation here is that the original design engineer is no longer here, and the original design was not MediaNet-friendly, in that it had a very few /20 subnets bridged over entire large sites.
These several large sites (with a few hundred wireless users per site), are connected to an HQ location (where the 7510s in failover mode are installed) via 1G ethernet hand-offs (MPLS at the WAN provider). The 7510s are new, and are replacing older contollers at the HQ location.
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(1) So, going local mode seems impractical due to the sheer number of users whose traffic bound for their local site would be traversing the WAN twice. Too much bandwidth would be used. So, that implies the need to use Flex / HREAP mode instead.
(2) However, re-designing each site's IP environment for MediaNet would suggest to go routed to the closet. However, this breaks seamless roaming for users....
So, this conundrum is why I thought I'd post here, and see if there was some other cool / nifty solution I wasn't yet aware of.
The only other (possibly friendly to both needs) solution I'd thought of was to GRE tunnel a subnet from each closet to the collapsed Core / Disti switch at each site. Unfortunately, GRE tunnels are not supported in the rev of IOS on the present equipment, and so it isn't possible to try this idea.
Another "blue sky" idea I had (not for this customer, but possibly elsewhere in the future), is to use LAN switches such as 3850s that have WLC functionality built-in. I haven't yet worked with the WLC s/w available on those, but I was thinking it looks like they could be put into a mobility group, and L3 user roaming between them might then work. Do you happen to know if this might be a workable solution to the overall big-picture problem?
Thanks again for taking the time and trouble to reply!
Deb

Best Practice for 2008R2 DC off site backup

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