Using The Active Directory Recycle Bin to Recover a Cluster Name Object (CNO) for Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clusters

This is another excellent post that I came across this weekend while catching up on whats been happening in the blog world!

Last year I had to recover a customers Hyper V cluster as an admin onsite in the customers premises decided to do a little 'Active Directory Tidy Up' and deleted the Cluster Name Object (CNO) for the Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster!!

I found this Technet article at the time and after reading through it I wanted to give it a go but unfortunatley the customer site didn't have a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller and I ended up just rebuilding the cluster (it was only a 2 node Hyper V with all the VM's backed up with DPM).

I remember thinking how useful and time-saving the Active Directory Recycle Bin would be if I was faced with a similar issue again but then completly forgot all about it until I read these blog posts from Chuck Timon and  John Marlin (Senior Support Escalation Engineers with Microsoft).

This is going to become a staple part of any new Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller installations that I do because the amount of time that can be saved with this process is unbelievable when compared any of the alternatives.

I highly recommend anyone reading this to add it as a standard part of their Windows 2008 R2 installations in future and even would go so far as to recommend adding it in now to any Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controllers on your customer sites.

Here are the links to both blog postings, the original one being authored by Chuck Timon in 2009 when nobody really had Windows Server 2008 R2 in mainstream use and the second and more recent one authored by John Marlin, who goes deep into the Active Directory Recycle Bin utility and how to recover from it.

Chuck Timon
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2009/04/27/recovering-a-deleted-cluster-name-object-cno-in-a-windows-server-2008-failover-cluster.aspx

John Marlin
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2011/05/18/recovering-a-deleted-cluster-name-object-cno-in-a-windows-server-2008-failover-cluster-part-2.aspx

Now, no more excuses for having to spend two days onsite rebuilding a cluster due to the CNO being deleted by some 'smart' thinking sys admin!

Enjoy!