Morning,

Just a quick one from me today I wanted to share.

I was playing with VDRO, and scratching my head as I was playing with restore plans, but I couldn’t find a very crucial step. ‘Prepare DC for DataLab’. It’s documented here: Prepare DC for DataLab - Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator User Guide

I’ll quote the key text as to why we need this:

This step is required for a domain controller to be started in a test lab environment. This must always be the first step for the domain controller in a lab group.

This step ensures the VM will reboot to exit DSRM (Directory Services Restore Mode) and therefore will function correctly as a domain controller in the lab.

Seems pretty important right?

Well, when I went to create my restore plan, I couldn’t find it, even the Veeam documentation doesn’t show it within the list:

After a lot of head scratching, turns out, I was missing something that is a bit light on helpcenter documentation! You need to define this at the DataLabs level:

Once added, it will force itself to the very first step of the plan (yep, even before ‘Restore VM’), you’ll also notice that the step isn’t adjustable within the list either, it can’t be moved up or down.

Hope this helped!