We have two DC's in our headquarters that are beefy boxes dedicated to being just DC's. They also hold our FSMO roles. However, in our larger remote sites, we are running DCs with VMWare. It has worked great. It reduced the number of boxes we support and what's great about a VM DC is you can shut it down and move it over to another box in less than 15 minutes. So hardware upgrades and maintenance have little impact on the users.
I'm not sure I recommend DC's being 100% VM, but if you put your FSMOs on dedicated boxes and run all other DCs in VMs I think you'll be pleased.
Kevin
| "Molkentin, Steve"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 06/06/2006 09:50 AM
|
|
Ada,
I am intrigued as to why "management" are directing you to do this. What benefits do they percieve? Do they understand the nature of the 2K3 directory and the load 7,000 users puts on it?
This is not a criticism - just a curious thinking out loud moment...
Personally - I wouldn't do it. Some would say a DC is a sacred thing, not to be toyed with. Proof of concept is always good in these scenarios... if you were to set this up in a lab, even with just two VMWare-ed DC's, you could show the overhead this would place on the machine and help them to understand the additional cost this will bring.
Remember, a DC that is just a DC (AD, DNS, maybe DHCP) doesn't need to be a gutsy box - it can just be a PC rebuilt with Win2K3 server on it. However it does need to stay up all the time. ;)
themolk.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rivera, Ada
Sent: Tuesday, 6 June 2006 9:51 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ActiveDir] Virtual DCs
We have a single domain forest with about 7,000 users. Currently we 8 AD regional sites and one HQ AD site. The regional sites each have a DC serving their local regional area and there are multiple DCs in our HQ site. The environment is currently running Windows 2000 SP4 and we are looking to upgrade our DCs to W2K3. The direction from management is that we will put all of our domain controllers on VM Ware when we upgrade the DCs to W2K3. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Good or Bad idea?
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