You can’t wait to install Windows server 8 developer preview in order to test it in the event of a future deployment… But you might want to finish your migration to ADDS 2008R2 before thinking about all that 😉 Bellow is a tab showing some client compatibility issues and the important steps when migrating your domain controllers to Windows server 2008R2:
The purpose of this article is to show how to restore deleted objects with their group membership using Powershell. In order to achieve this you will need to set up a lag site in your domain. If your domain functional level is Windows 2008R2 and you have turned on the recycle bin, you can simply restore an object with its group membership using Microsoft Powershell 2.0 Cmdlets without any lag site.
The method we will describe to achieve practically the same result works starting Windows 2003 server and later versions. We will restore objects from the Tombstone using Quest AD Cmdlets, your administration console should be at least running Windows XP, you do not need to install the RSAT (running on Windows 7 and 2008 server). You might have noticed on the “latest AD news sidebar“ that QAD Cmdlets version 1.4 was released a few days ago. The disadvantage of the method described is that it might be not supported by MS, for best practices regarding deleted objects restore you can read this KB article, you will also need to modify your Active Directory schema. Use this method if a few accounts are deleted, if have you deleted an entire OU use a proper authoritative restore. The advantage of using the powershell script is that the restore process is really quick.
When you perform a complete domain or forest recovery, after you have restored the first DC system state, you have to cleanup metadata of the DCs on which you will reinstall AD using a DCPromo. For more information about disaster recovery plans I suggest you read this document.
On a Windows 2008 server when you delete the DC computer object, server object removal (cn=ServerName,cn=Servers,cn=SiteName, cn=Sites,cn=Configuration,dc=ForestRootDomain) and metadata cleanup are performed automatically. On a Windows 2003 server you need to use the ntdsutil command line tool and delete the server object manually. This post describes how to set up a semi automated process to perform these steps.
