Thanks and understood.
We have multiple datacenters and each datacenter will have one or more new
8-way boxes with 32gb or 64gb ram as the ESX consolidation platform.
When/where we need more than one DC in a datacenter we'll distribute the
VMs across multiple physical boxes. I believe that covers the distributed
aspect of your reply as we'll still have DCs in more than one site and DCs
per site across multiple boxes.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, they have Virtual Server (not yet ready
for primetime) but we're going with VMWare ESX, recently acquired by EMC.
Will talk with them about virtualizing DCs in general though as that's a
good idea. We've had ongoing design reviews but have not covered this
aspect.
Thanks,
Mike
"Mulnick, Al"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: cc:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] DC's on
VMWare
tivedir.org
01/13/2004 02:36 PM
Please respond to
ActiveDir
There's no particular reason why you couldn't put a DC on a VM that I'm
aware of. However, for production purposes I would say that you should
carefully consider this approach. The idea of a distributed directory is
to
have it, well, distributed. If all you plan to use the ESX for is to put
DC's on it, then it really does defeat the purpose of a distributed
directory. Failure of ESX hardware, would mean failure of potentially
many
apps or if multiple DC's then the failure of multiple DC's at one time.
Additionally, the cost of the larger hardware to house the multiple VM's
may
outweigh the cost of multiple physical machines running Windows 2003 DC's.
To get similar performance, you'll need to really understand the underlying
hardware and the implications of the apps running in those VM sessions to
prevent contention of resources. That indicates a fairly large investment
in hardware to achieve what you describe.
What you may want to do is check with your local Microsoft support office
and see about getting a supportability review to ensure that what you are
doing is not only possible from their perspective (it's their product
right)
but also whether or not it's recommended by Microsoft at all. They
shouldn't care one way or another about hardware from a money standpoint
since you have to buy just as many licences either way or in your case,
just
as many Windows 2003 licences and an additional ESX license.
As is often the case, just because you can doesn't mean you should. :)
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Baudino [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 3:12 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ActiveDir] DC's on VMWare
All,
Server consolidation has us heading towards putting production Windows
Server 2003 domain controllers on VMWare VMs using ESX. We have not yet
deployed AD widely (some business units have it and some don't) but are
working on a new design that will handle all business units. Our lab is a
combination of physical servers on workstation-class hardware and VMs on
VMWare Workstation4 and on ESX.
However, our direction for production DC's is VMs on ESX unless we find
that
it doesn't work properly or well enough. We're going to be testing this in
the lab. I've seen recent emails about using VMs to spin off labs.
But does anyone have experience running production DC's on VMs or any known
"gotcha's" that they're willing to share?
Thanks,
Mike Baudino
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