Question : Opinions of test plan for Exchange 2003 bare-metal restore

I am in the planning stages of a Disaster Recovery plan for our Exchange 2003 tape backups and would like to hear some critiques.  At the end of this I plan to test in a lab environment, as the main goal here is to confirm that we have good backups and can recover if we fry....  I have never attempted this before and want to make sure that I have a good handle on the process.  Here's some background and specs:

- Exchange 2003 on dedicated server
- 2 Server2003 DC's
- Backup Exec 9.1 to a LTO-3 (Exchange backups include Full - Database & Logs as well as Full - Back up messages on a nightly basis)


Here's the plan & my questions:

1. Since there's no way I'll bring a second mail server online I want to build a new 2K3 DC and dcpromo it to replicate the accounts, then take offline & bring it back up on test network.  I have to have AD present to rebuild the Exchange server, correct?  It has to be the same AD domain, correct?

2. Build a second 2K3 server to host Exchange test and bring it up on test network and join the test domain  (I can't replicate the hardware, so it's be dissimilar from the old Exchange Server, so old server system state is useless, correct?)

3. Install Exchange 2K3 with disasterrecovery switch, hook it up the backup server (which I will of course have to add to the test domain)

4. In Exchange, check the  "This database can be overwritten by a restore" option on the First Storage Group (not Recovery, correct)

5. Restore from tape unchecking the No loss restore option in Backup Exec

6.  Mount Store

7. Test mail client.

How far off base am I?









 

Answer : Opinions of test plan for Exchange 2003 bare-metal restore

Your test Plan is prefect only thing you need to make sure is that this testing is done in isolated network in order to avoid having a name conflict and other issues. Also you need to make this test DC FSMO role owner also.