1 week ago I had to work during the whole weekend 

Yes, occasionally some work for customers needs to be done during a maintenance window, often during the weekend, not possible during weekdays.

If it doesn’t happen every week and it is possible to schedule it when it suits for yourselves, no problem .

Well, last weekend I had to work with a colleague of mine for a customer in a datacenter.

Because of the very bad implementation before of the infrastructure (not done by us ), we needed to verify and document the whole setup and every network-connection.

Why?

We had to turn off the whole Hyper-V cluster, storage, servers, virtual machines, …

Afterwards we needed to remove all cabling, reorganize all devices, change the configuration, recabling everything and turn on the infrastructure again.

You wouldn’t believe how bad the setup was!!!

All went spotless , it was not our first time we did some project like that : my colleague, a network and firewall specialist and myself a backup, hypervisor and storage specialist.

Together, that can’t be a problem…we cover a lot of knowledge...

… but when we turned on again the storage and Hyper-V hosts, everything went fine, except I saw that the Hyper-V cluster was not able to work.

Of course, the Active Directory was missing!!!

Normally I put 1 domain controller on local storage, instead of putting all the domain controllers on the shared storage because of the dependence of active directory, but I didn’t setup the infra before.

Also the DR infra was not OK, because that was the project afterwards to put this like it should be, so no active domain controller was online.

Also my bad, I didn’t check before that there was a DC on local storage instead of all on CSVs.

Luckily I saw in the disk manager all CSVs, but what was the best way to enable the Hyper-V cluster…?

The last solution in my opinion was to restore a DC on local storage, but there had to be a better way…

I searched on the internet and found a post from the one and only @WorkingHardInIT  !!!

Cluster Shared Volumes without Active Directory - Working Hard In ITWorking Hard In IT

Then I knew for sure I had to contact Didier, because he is THE HYPER-V GURU in this world!

I told my colleague that I wanted to contact him, because no one in my company would know a solution as I am more or less the one with the most knowledge of Hyper-V clusters, but in that particular subject I did not comply enough and I knew that no one else than Didier that could help me faster and better than him.

Luckily I know Didier personally and it’s a pure coincidence that we are both from Belgium 

So, I called him.

Well, Didier assisted me by telephone in performing the best steps and after 10 minutes or so, my Hyper-V cluster was back online and could turn on my domain controllers and other virtual machines.

So Didier saved me that evening from getting stressed and gave it a positive outcome.

It’s unbelievable, the knowledge of all the members of this community together!

So, to summarize : the strenght of the Veeam Community is unbelievable strong and outstanding !!!