Veeam Explorer for
Microsoft Active Directory

Veeam® Backup & Replication™ creates application-consistent, image-level backups of Active Directory, ensuring successful recovery of business-critical services and allowing for application-specific restore scenarios with effective log truncation.

1. Open a Veeam Backup Job Creation wizard
2. Add a desired Domain Controller to the task
3. Specify the amount of time to keep the Active Directory backup
4. Make sure you enable application-aware image processing (AAIP) to ensure transactional consistency of OS and applications running on the VM, including the Active Directory database and SYSVOL catalog

By enabling application-aware processing in job settings, Veeam Backup & Replication performs the following operations as a part of the backup or replication process:

1. Veeam Backup & Replication deploys the runtime process on the VM and detects if the VM runs any of the supported applications, including Active Directory.
2. Veeam Backup & Replication collects information about applications installed on VMs — this information is required for VSS-aware restore. VSS-aware restore is performed when the VM is started after you restore it from the backup or fail over to a VM replica.
3. Veeam Backup & Replication prepares applications for VSS-aware restore.
4. Microsoft VSS communicates with applications and quiesces I/O activities at a specific point in time.
5. Veeam Backup & Replication acts as a VSS requestor and triggers a VM VSS snapshot.
6. Veeam Backup & Replication triggers a VMware vSphere snapshot of the VM.
7. Microsoft VSS resumes quiesced I/O activities on the VM guest OS.
8. The job session proceeds as usual.
9. If you have instructed Veeam Backup & Replication to truncate transaction logs, Veeam Backup & Replication truncates transaction logs on the VM guest OS after the backup or replica are successfully created.