Assignment: Disaster Recovery Plan

You are an administrator for the Contoso Corporation. The Contoso Corporation has two large sites. The corporate office is in New York and the manufacturing site is in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition, the Contoso Corporation has five smaller sites.

At the Corporate site, you currently have eight physical Hyper-V hosts that host approximately one hundred twenty virtual machines. The virtual machines are running Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012. The servers are needed to host email, various databases, file services, print services, and a point-of sales-application. The virtual machines are stored on a centrally located storage area network (SAN) that has multiple power supplies, and use redundant array of independent disks (RAID).

Over the last three years, you have had two power failures that caused the servers to go down at the corporate office. Recently, during one of these incidents, files on one of the servers were corrupted. It was later discovered that the backup could only partially restore the data files, but could not restore the server itself.

The servers must remain available and reliable. As the administrator, you must ensure that you can recover from a failure or problem quickly with minimum loss.

Write a three to five page paper in which you:

1. Develop a continuity plan / disaster recovery plan for Contoso Corporation in which you address the following:

a. Suggest an approach that provides redundancy (failover) for all mission critical functions in the event of a disaster including power failure. Consider the following in your approach: Essential Infrastructure; Email; Database; File Services; Print Services; Point-of-Sale Applications; Power Redundancy Solutions.

b. Identify the changes that should be made to the backup procedures in order to address the problem with the server backups.

c. Outline the necessary actions that Server Administrators must verify for proper operation of servers in the event of a failover.

d. Provide a plan for returning all services back to the primary systems once the crisis has passed.

e. Examine the pros and cons of moving part of the data center to the Cleveland office and housing it there on a permanent basis. Provide your recommendation for the stated action.