Virtualise domain controllers

unless i am missing something, why would you bother virtualising something on a 1:1 ratio? are you planning on adding another host at a later date for high-availability goodness, and then loading other vm's also?

do a search on here, i'm fairly sure there was quite a good discussion about virtualisation and server roles... there were arguments for all physical vs. all virtual vs. a combination of the two.
 
It wouldn't be unwise, virtualising DC's as a rule isn't a problem. You have to be careful of where its getting its time from if its on VMware, dunno about HyperV

If you've only got one host, you wouldn't gain much, apart perhaps being able to run a few VM's on there to get the most out of the hardware. I supposed you'd be able to have a dedicated DC and file server and email server etc etc. I'd want to make one of the other VM's a DC too though.
 
It would mainly be for disaster recovery. Also for upgrading complete hardware later, it would be easier to shift a VM rather than my current situation of bring a new DC online (2008) and then adding the roles of each DC and then decommissioning the old ones.
 
I assume then you'd be using something like ESXi, rather than pay for 2 licenses of Windows (or enterprise)

How often do you really upgrade a DC?
 
Yes, even under Hyper-V you can use 1 licence for Host and then up to 4 VMs per host. (Our licences are cheap anyway as its education, not that I like to waste money!)

These DCs were last upgraded 5 years ago.
 
So in 5 years you'd probably be upgrading to the next version of server OS anyway, or have to mess around with the HAL due to the CPU in your new server being too different from the current one. Plus you have double the chance of a problem with the OS since you essentially have 2 Windows running.
 
Our current infrastructure of 24 VMs across 3 hosts includes 2 dedicated DCs. VMotion etc all works fine. So often I see people putting ridiculous spec physical hardware for DCs (Quad core cpus and 8gb ram for 200 users) when a little 512mb Win2003 VM works perfectly :)
 
I virtualised our Domain Controllers around 12 months ago, haven't had any problems what so ever. Before I went ahead and virtualised them though, I did read a few articles that didn't recommend it, as it's 12 months ago, I can't remember the reasoning behind it.
 
I guess it makes for easier DR if you clone/have a copy of the virtual machine.

I was tempted to run vmware converter on our servers for this reason (and to try a few things).

From what i've read it's not recommend to run it on DCs / Exchange 2003 though...
 
Very much so.

A lot of the servers that we had running were old and in need of replacing.

It worked out considerably cheaper to buy fewer higher spec servers than it would have been to buy lower end replacements for each individual box. And I think that's the case in a lot of organisations.

And I really don't see a DC any differently than any other server, I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't want to virtualise a DC.
 
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