Disaster Recovery Setup – Data Center

The Storage Area Network had power failure and malfunctioned. This took down Active Directory domain controllers and Exchange Servers. Furthermore, the restore for Active Directory was failing.

The main objective was to restore the services as soon as possible. To achieve this, Synergy IT setup a brand new Active Directory Forest on VMWare ESXi 5.5 and configured Logon Scripts and Group Policies. Fortunately, the database files for Exchange were available through a virtual machine. A brand new installation of Exchange Server was performed and database were re-attached to this new environment.

To streamline this process, scripts were executed to extract the users from the Exchange Databases and populate the new Active Directory with these user accounts. Additionally, scripts were ran on the workstations by the IT staff that quickly disjoined the workstations from the old active directory and joined them back to the new active directory domain services. The services were restored within 24 hours.