I currently have a WS2012R2 Essentials VM running at home. It has AD and DNS on it. All the computers connecting to it (windows based) are on it's domain. When ever i need to stop the server to do work, i lose DNS and it makes working with server names impossible since nothing there to respond with ip address.
My questions is, how can i setup a 2nd backup dns server on the network. It can be another VM running on some other box.
Side note, I currently have Sophos 9 UTM as home router/firewall app.
Thanks
If I understand you correctly - you have AD services and you have DNS. Both are served by the same server today and you've licensed it in a way where you are only allowed to have one while remaining "license compliant", but the cost of upgrading the license to something more flexible is prohibitive for a home/lab user.
The core problem is that when this server fails you lose both AD and DNS. You can live without AD (because your clients cache credentials and know how to work offline - or perhaps some clients don't care about AD at all) but losing DNS makes all kinds of things fail.
Its kindof a PITA, but this is what I did:
I use my pfSense router as the primary DNS for everything, using the default DNS resolver. I advertise the router as DNS in DHCP and set it manually in everything that is static. In the resolver I do a "domain override" for the AD domain (home.<mydomain>.com pointing to the DC). I also add a second Domain Override for the domain controller search domain so that hosts can always find the domain controller directly (_msdcs.home.<mydomain>.com also pointing to the DC). Finally, for specific hosts that are static on my home network I added Host Overrides (BlueIris.home.<mydomain>.com, etc).
This way if I lose the DC I only lose AD services and the locally registered hostnames for the AD hosts. But DNS still resolves normally for everything else.