I'm in a tough spot with our Disaster Recovery setup and need some serious advice. We've got a significant fleet running natively in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while some resources are still in Azure and AWS. After moving away from VMware due to Broadcom's changes, I've realized the hard way that many popular tools like Zerto, Veeam, and Commvault won't work with native OCI since they need hypervisor environments. Right now, I've shifted our FSMO roles to Azure just to secure AD backups with Commvault. Frankly, the native OCI disaster recovery options and backup solutions are pretty terrible. Recently, we spent a whole month without a solid way to restore Active Directory authoritatively, and while I've managed to speed up our Forest recovery to about 30 minutes for single Domain Controllers, our actual infrastructure is much larger and more complex. We ended our contract with Rubrik in December, and I can't go back to them. My fear is that I'm going to need to invest in two separate platforms—one for infrastructure DR and another for AD DR. Has anyone had experience with Semperis? I'd love to hear your thoughts and any insights from your own experiences; I could really use the help!
2 Answers
While I haven’t dealt with this specific situation, have you considered using block volume replication for your AD instance? Veeam can work with the Windows agent for that. It could make recovery smoother for your infrastructure DR needs, but I get that these aren’t fully supported options for larger-scale recovery.
It sounds like you're dealing with some real headaches in your current setup! You're spot on about the limitations of native OCI. Many mature DR tools assume a hypervisor is in play, which can make things challenging when you're trying to do everything natively. Semperis is indeed a solid choice for AD DR, especially in mixed environments like yours. It specializes in authoritative recovery and could be a good fit alongside some basic backups for your VMs. Pairing it with native Azure backups for your infrastructure might just be the practical solution you need.
Yeah, I think splitting the solutions sounds necessary. Commvault mentioned they’re working on improvements, but it might not be quick enough for your needs. Kudos for being proactive with your Azure setup; that’s definitely a smart workaround!
That replication route could work for a single DC recoverability, but definitely not a long-term fix for everything you need. If you find a good AD-friendly solution in OCI, do share it! This juggling act is exhausting.