Whether to virtualise our main servers

[seawolf]

I am doing some more research on the backup software and am giving Veeam a better look.

 

To use Veeam I would need to do the data storage as a virtual disk file rather than passthrough. Is there any other reason why Veeam would not work for the plan I laid out?

 

Would I need a Veeam license for the backup server if it was not actually being backed up? Is there any good reason for considering a version other than Veeam Backup Essentials for an organisation of our size?

 

You could leave your data outside of a VDK and back that up using BackupAssist if you wanted. If you don't have an enormous amount of data to store, then a VDK would be fine, it's just when you start getting 1TB+ of data that you would be best to keep that out of a Veeam backup file or it can take a long time to backup/restore the VM server.

 

Veeam Backup Essentials should be fine for your environment. The licensing is for the hosts, not the backup server.

[burgemaster]

Why does hyper-v require a physical DC please!! We have DC1 and DC2 both virtualized on different 2012 hosts.

 

No problems in 2 years. Or have I been dodging the bullet!!!!!!

[SkreeM1980]

I am doing some more research on the backup software and am giving Veeam a better look.

 

To use Veeam I would need to do the data storage as a virtual disk file rather than passthrough. Is there any other reason why Veeam would not work for the plan I laid out?

 

Would I need a Veeam license for the backup server if it was not actually being backed up? Is there any good reason for considering a version other than Veeam Backup Essentials for an organisation of our size?

 

I have a veeam backup essentials licence and I have a much bigger environment. You only need to license the hosts you back up from. We backup approx 6.5tb of vm's in a 6hour window each night. Backing up from 3 hosts using 2 veeam proxys/and repositories.

 

My next mission is to migrate file share data from cifs shares on a san/nas to 2012vms primarily so I can get the veeam benefits for backup. Also dedupe on 2012 rocks. I did a 900gb test server of our student home folders and got 30% saving of space.

[seawolf]

Why does hyper-v require a physical DC please!! We have DC1 and DC2 both virtualized on different 2012 hosts.

 

No problems in 2 years. Or have I been dodging the bullet!!!!!!

 

There are quite a few systems and services that are highly dependant on a functioning DNS and/or AD domain. This includes SAN or NAS devices. So, if your virtual environment is down due to an extended power outage or other event you may have difficulty bringing everything back online. This is not just a theoretical risk. I have experienced it personally about 5 years ago with a SAN environment that required DNS to function properly. I had to quickly install the DNS role on a physical server before the SAN was fully functional.

 

Beyond that, you are placing all of your eggs in one basket and if your virtual environment is down for any reason, then no system or person can authenticate and DNS will not resolve including external DNS.

 

You don't need to spend a lot on a physical DC. We just use a small Dell R210 with 4GB RAM that runs in a separate building to our main infrastructure. Cost us less than 2k.

 

http://blog.joeware.net/2013/02/20/2675/

 

http://blog.joeware.net/2013/03/04/2679/

Edited February 27, 2014 by seawolf

[zag]

Why does hyper-v require a physical DC please!! We have DC1 and DC2 both virtualized on different 2012 hosts.

 

No problems in 2 years. Or have I been dodging the bullet!!!!!!

 

Thats a really bad network design idea, you can get horribly caught in a loop that way.

 

Always use physical DC's. So much stuff is dependent on them with Hyper-V

[localzuk]

Why does hyper-v require a physical DC please!! We have DC1 and DC2 both virtualized on different 2012 hosts.

 

No problems in 2 years. Or have I been dodging the bullet!!!!!!

 

Microsoft have a knowledgebase article on virtualised DCs - Things to consider when you host Active Directory domain controllers in virtual hosting environments

 

One of the things to remember is that if your Hyper-V hosts are members of the domain (which, if you want to use any of the clustered failover stuff they need to be I believe), you then have a chicken and egg problem - if your entire cluster is down, and you turn it back on, your host nodes now won't have a DC to work with, as they are guests on top of the host and aren't live. If you use things like clustered storage volumes then you won't be able to boot up your VMs either, as your host won't have access to a DC to authenticate access to the CSV.

 

So, some potentially major problems.

[sparkeh]

At the risk of having eggs thrown at me, its not quite true that you *must* always have a physical DC with Hyper-V, it depends on your setup. Our main host is not part of a failover cluster, no SAN, everything is on local storage, there are nothing that depends on a functioning domain to start. You start the host and the DCs start up. Yes there might be a short period where there is no domain but its only the time to restart the main host or start up the replicated VMs on the backup host. It isn't worth us purchasing and maintaining a physical DC just for that.

 

Just to address the failover cluster question as well. Advice given out by Veeam here:

From Virtualizing a Domain Controller or not? - Spiceworks

you can create a failover cluster and keep one DC as not highly available and on the local storage. That takes out the risk when everything goes down at once

[seawolf]

At the risk of having eggs thrown at me, its not quite true that you *must* always have a physical DC with Hyper-V, it depends on your setup. Our main host is not part of a failover cluster, no SAN, everything is on local storage, there are nothing that depends on a functioning domain to start. You start the host and the DCs start up. Yes there might be a short period where there is no domain but its only the time to restart the main host or start up the replicated VMs on the backup host. It isn't worth us purchasing and maintaining a physical DC just for that.

 

Just to address the failover cluster question as well. Advice given out by Veeam here:

 

 

I'm not throwing eggs at you, but what if there is an extended power outage and then a failure on startup of the host for the DC that is on local storage? That may seem somewhat unlikely, but rapid power off events are one of the most likely things to cause hardware failures.

 

Also, wouldn't this setup require at least three hosts if one host is not part of a failover cluster? Two hosts is more common in my experience, at least in school environments.

[burgemaster]

I believe we are in the same situation as sparkeh.

 

We have multiple hosts (four) that are not part of a cluster. We have all the VMs hosted locally on the hosts as we don't have a SAN. I don't think we can get caught in the chicken/egg trap. IF ever one of the hosts was to go down the other would pick up the authentications. If both hosts that were hosting each DCs we to go down we could them bring it back on one of the other remaining two.

 

I know it is not the idea setup. But we cant afford a SAN, and we are using our underpowered Dell Poweredge rack servers.

 

localzuk - The hosts are domain members, but in that situation of double host failure wouldn't we be able to login locally and start the VMs??

 

I could easily rebuild DC3 onto a physical server as we have the capacity. What do you think please?

Edited February 27, 2014 by burgemaster

[sparkeh]

I'm not throwing eggs at you, but what if there is an extended power outage and then a failure on startup of the host for the DC that is on local storage? That may seem somewhat unlikely, but rapid power off events are one of the most likely things to cause hardware failures.

Ok fair point, but this isn't just restricted to VMs, what would happen if your physical DC suffered the same fate? Also it would probably be easier to recover from this in a virtualised environment (given a good backup strategy).

Also, wouldn't this setup require at least three hosts if one host is not part of a failover cluster? Two hosts is more common in my experience, at least in school environments.

Don't think so, as far as I am aware you can run a standalone VM separate from the cluster on the cluster node. Just run up your VM, use local storage, but don't make it highly available and it operates as a standalone VM. In the event of problems you can startup your standalone DC then bring up your cluster. At least that is what I have read about what other people have done but can't claim personal experience of doing it.

[seawolf]

Ok fair point, but this isn't just restricted to VMs, what would happen if your physical DC suffered the same fate? Also it would probably be easier to recover from this in a virtualised environment (given a good backup strategy).

 

 

Yes, it certainly could. But, the added complexity of a virtual environment makes it more likely there. The more moving parts, the more there is to break.

 

Don't think so, as far as I am aware you can run a standalone VM separate from the cluster on the cluster node. Just run up your VM, use local storage, but don't make it highly available and it operates as a standalone VM. In the event of problems you can startup your standalone DC then bring up your cluster. At least that is what I have read about what other people have done but can't claim personal experience of doing it.

 

Ah, I see what you are doing. Just make sure you don't set this server to be your primary authentication server or DNS server in any systems where you have to set primary and secondary LDAP or DNS (external systems, firewall/VPN, DHCP server, web filter, etc). Because if that server goes down (and it's more likely it could as it's not highly available) then you will encounter problems. For this same reason, you shouldn't make the physical DC that is your "safety net" in a virtualised environment your primary LDAP/DNS either.

 

Learned that lesson the hard way,

[seawolf]

I believe we are in the same situation as sparkeh.

 

We have multiple hosts (four) that are not part of a cluster. We have all the VMs hosted locally on the hosts as we don't have a SAN. I don't think we can get caught in the chicken/egg trap. IF ever one of the hosts was to go down the other would pick up the authentications. If both hosts that were hosting each DCs we to go down we could them bring it back on one of the other remaining two.

 

I know it is not the idea setup. But we cant afford a SAN, and we are using our underpowered Dell Poweredge rack servers.

 

localzuk - The hosts are domain members, but in that situation of double host failure wouldn't we be able to login locally and start the VMs??

 

I could easily rebuild DC3 onto a physical server as we have the capacity. What do you think please?

 

You have an unusual virtualisation setup with 4 hosts all using local storage and none of them in a cluster. Your problem won't be in not having a physical DC. It will come about from the lack of HA and losing VM servers when a host goes down.

 

Hopefully you have a good backup strategy?

[ChrisH]

The newer version of Clustering services is supposed to start without AD if necessary; although I haven't tested that scenario.

[tmcd35]

You have an unusual virtualisation setup with 4 hosts all using local storage and none of them in a cluster. Your problem won't be in not having a physical DC. It will come about from the lack of HA and losing VM servers when a host goes down.

 

Isn't Hyper-V Replica designed just for this exact scenario? Automatically updating copies of VM images between non clustered hosts to provide HA on host failure?

[Jollity]

I had also been interested in the reasons for needing a physical DC.

 

Do you think it is necessary to keep the master roles (schema master, PDC emulator etc) on the physical DC or is it just a question of having a DC and DNS server so the main virtualised ones can get going? Edit: I had missed the last page. If I read correct, Seawolf is saying it is better to have the primary AD server on the virtual server for availability reasons.

 

I was thinking that our VM hosts would just not be kept on the domain to reduce the risk of dependency loops. I want to use one of the old servers as a physical DC, but I do not think it will last more than a couple more years, but we can probably find something to use after that.

Edited February 27, 2014 by Jollity

[sparkeh]

I had also been interested in the reasons for needing a physical DC.

 

Do you think it is necessary to keep the master roles (schema master, PDC emulator etc) on the physical DC or is it just a question of having a DC and DNS server so the main virtualised ones can get going? Edit: I had missed the last page. If I read correct, Seawolf is saying it is better to have the primary AD server on the virtual server for availability reasons.

 

I was thinking that our VM hosts would just not be kept on the domain to reduce the risk of dependency loops. I want to use one of the old servers as a physical DC, but I do not think it will last more than a couple more years, but we can probably find something to use after that.

If you are building a failover cluster then you are making your VM DCs 'highly available' so you should be putting your critical services on these, as @seawolf has said the physical DC is a safety net and more likely to fail.

[seawolf]

Isn't Hyper-V Replica designed just for this exact scenario? Automatically updating copies of VM images between non clustered hosts to provide HA on host failure?

 

I don't believe MS intended the Hyper-V Replica feature to be used in this configuration. It would make more sense if two of the Hyper-V hosts were setup in a Primary failover cluster (primary site) with two additional Hyper-V hosts in a separate backup failover cluster (secondary site) and replication occurred between the hosts at the primary site and the hosts at the secondary site.

 

In this situation though, you would have 4 completely independent Hyper-V hosts replicating to three other Hyper-V hosts. If a VM goes down - which replica takes over?

 

EDIT: Also, please don't think that Hyper-V Replication is designed for HA - it is not. You will have to manually spin up the replica VM on the secondary host, and you will likely have some data loss. See Microsoft Tech Note regarding unscheduled outages and Hyper-V replicas:

 

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

 

In a BC scenario and a planned failover event of a primary VM, Hyper-V Replica will first copy any un-replicated changes to the replica VM, such that the event produces no loss of data. Once the planned failover is completed, the replica VM will then become the primary VM and carry the workload, while a reverse replication is automatically set. In a DR scenario, i.e. an unplanned outage of a primary VM, an operator will need to manually bring up the replicated VM with an expectation of some data loss, since changes of the primary VM not yet replicated to the replicated VM have now been lost along with the unplanned outage.

 

- See more at:

Hyper-V Replica Explained, Windows Server 2012 Style - Yung Chou on Hybrid Cloud - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Edited February 27, 2014 by seawolf

[zag]

Yeh thats exactly why I didn't go with the replica system and have mine designed for manual failover on local storage.

[tmcd35]

@zag, do you not have the same core issue as Replica though? As in you're only as good as the time interval from the last clone/backup? I think it was mentioned a few posts back, full HA requires SCVVM and SCOM and some form of shared storage.

[zag]

Yeh, definitely only as good as your last backup.

 

Veeam all the way for that

[sparkeh]

Yeh, definitely only as good as your last backup.

 

Veeam all the way for that

Agreed, with Veeam's replication feature you can keep very close replicas for minimal data loss.