Active Directory Virtualization (10 Important Considerations)
In any case, since domain controllers are the most important machines in a Microsoft-based environment, and having failed DCs hanging out there can have adverse effects on many network services, devices and applications, you should really consider carefully planning your setup, just like you would for physical servers. For example, here are some important considerations:
- If you virtualize your DCs, you should configure the VMs running the domain controllers to always start when the parent starts, no matter what their running state was (this is configurable in the virtual machine settings).
- If you virtualize your DCs, configure any other virtual machines to start automatically but with a delayed start time to allow the domain controllers to start up prior to the other virtual machines.
- If you virtualize your DCs, you should configure the domain controller virtual machines to shutdown (and not save state) if the physical computer is shutdown.
- Plan and test managing of the Hyper-V environment in case all the virtual domain controllers fails to start.
- You should NEVER use saved state/snapshots with domain controllers, unless there's only one DC.
- Just like in physical servers, ALWAYS have more than one domain controller.
- Spread the domain controllers across separate physical machines. There's no point running all DCs on the same Hyper-V host server if it fails for some reason.
- Disable time synchronization for the domain controllers. They are supposed to be the source of time in the domain, and you don't want them to take the time from their host, which then takes the time from the domain controller.
- Make sure you plan, text and implement a good and working System State backup for at least some of your DCs. This is mostly true for Global Catalogs and FSMO Role holders.
- If you have more than one Hyper-V server hosting virtual machines running domain controller roles, you might want to plan a method of quickly transferring these VMs between the physical Hyper-V hosts. This can be accomplished by using Power Shell scripts or VM management tools such as SCVMM 2008.
Good luck, Happy VM Deployment.
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