Most of our clients run their DC's in VMs already. VM's are always a good suggestion. :)
The real issue I have with running a second DC in a super small site is overhead. The Windows license really isn't THAT expensive at around $800 or less, but then you have your recurring costs: * patches and management * monitoring * A/V * CPU and memory resource consumption * Yet Another Box In Your Network Or, we could just spend a few dollars a month for a hosted secondary DNS service. Of course, offsite DNS doesn't help if your DC goes KABLAM! and you need to restore AD, but again I'm fielding options. So that's the angle I'm trying to use to attack this problem. -----Original Message----- From: Steve Yuroff [mailto:syur...@hiebing.com] Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 2:11 PM To: Dustin Puryear; LOPSA Tech List Subject: Re: [lopsa-tech] Offsite DNS hosting for Active Directory On 10/1/10 1:15 PM, "Dustin Puryear" <dpury...@puryear-it.com> wrote: > We have a [common] situation where a company has a single site, has Active > Directory, and only has one Domain Controller (DC). We could bring up a second > DC, but there are hardware and licensing costs. That, and most AD networks > that are workstation-heavy can survive quite well after a DC goes down for a > good bit of time. If you exclude the fact that the DC is also the DNS primary > for that network. > > Anyone know of a DNS hosting service that is known to play well with hosting > secondary DNS for AD DNS? > > And what are your thoughts on this in terms of security? Anyone using a > hosting service to provide secondary DNS capabilities for internal DNS? > > --- Is there any existing hardware that would be suitable for running a 2nd DC in a VM? I ran 5-6 VM's (including a DC) in an Ubuntu/VMWare Server setup before I moved to Xen, on a server that was low end 3 years ago. You'd still have the licensing issue, but how many months of DNS hosting charges will it take to surpass the one time license purchase? -- Steve Yuroff Network and System Administrator Hiebing syur...@hiebing.com 608.256.6357 _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
