2008 R2 PDC as VM?

[Chuckster]

I have 2 x 2003 DCs. What I am thinking of doing is having a 2008 R2 as a DC within a VM holding the FSMO roles and set up another 2008 R2 on a physical box acting as the secondary DC. Once fully operationl then demote the 2003 DCs.

 

My question is, would anyone think of making their 2008 R2 PDC a VM in ESXi?

[EduTech]

Yep, We have both our Domain Controllers on Virtual Hosts as VM's. The DC's are split so on different host's so atleast if 1 host dies the other VM DC can take over.

 

Works fine and have not had any problems!

 

And the way you have said to do it would be fine, although i would just put the 2nd DC as a VM also rather than a physical box. make that another host.

 

James.

[Chuckster]

Do you take a tape back up of your system state every night through your VM?

 

What's actually on your DCs? Is one just holding the FSMO roles, DHCP, DNS, AD and the other one the same minus FMSO?

 

Do either VMs act as a file server to store user directories, shared folders, etc or are these on a physical member server?

[EduTech]

Do you take a tape back up of your system state every night through your VM?

 

What's actually on your DCs? Is one just holding the FSMO roles, DHCP, DNS, AD and the other one the same minus FMSO?

 

Do either VMs act as a file server to store user directories, shared folders, etc or are these on a physical member server?

 

I am not going to comment on the backup's of VM's at this moment in time

 

DC-01 - AD and DNS

DC-02- Replication

DHCP - Having this seperate was to not put too much load on the DC's as we now have alot of external services etc

 

The VMs only do those services, all FILE STORAGE is currently on a Physical Storage Server soon to be moved over to another Server which we brough 15k Disk's for and students and staff storage will be on there merging it all onto the 1 server rather then the 2 seperate storage servers at the moment that are vastly running out of diskspace.

 

James.

[Chuckster]

I take it by the wink there is no backup?

 

I suppose having the entire VM backed up wouldn't pose too much of a problem, right? I mean, if both DCs are VMs then there there shouldn't be this issue of time/date lapses etc.

 

I think what I will do is go down the same route as you did and take it from there. Since I have a spare server I could leave that as a file server hosting all user storage etc.

 

Thanks for the quick replies.

[Chuckster]

One other thing, do you have a dedicated NIC for the DCs or do you share the DCs NICs with other VMs?

[EduTech]

I take it by the wink there is no backup?

 

I suppose having the entire VM backed up wouldn't pose too much of a problem, right? I mean, if both DCs are VMs then there there shouldn't be this issue of time/date lapses etc.

 

I think what I will do is go down the same route as you did and take it from there. Since I have a spare server I could leave that as a file server hosting all user storage etc.

 

Thanks for the quick replies.

 

I did monitor the time/date stamps as this was something i thought about and did not see any problems when i did this on the demo rig i have at home.

 

with regards to the backups, nothing is in place for the VM's as of yet mainly because I'm awaiting the easter holiday to drag them over the ESXI as at the moment they are running on VMware Server 2 as are the SIMS Server, SharePoint Front End and Exchange which also will be moved the ESXI.

 

with regards to the NIC's each of the host's have a 10gb Fibre Link to the Core and as we have an Extreme Networks Core and Edge we dont have any issues with regards to the network. (Fibre Cards were around 1k each at the time of purchase i believe)

 

For some ammusement, we had an issue a few weeks ago where a student had damage a network point causing a broadcast had drop outs on the ping response from the host servers but could not ping any server that just used the 1gbit LAN Card.. so even with that kind of load still was able to ping the Hosts.. which is what made me think it was a problem with the Virtual Networks on those Hosts to start with *obviously at the point of finding the problem was unaware of the damaged network point* my boss went in as i was @ BETT Still and unplugged the fibre links and traced it that way. point is the network can take a good bashing! and dont really notice the load on the 10gb Links.

 

No Problem with regards to the replys, i am sure there are many other people who will have the same thoughts or/ have slightly different setups.

 

James.

Edited February 13, 2010 by EduTech

[FN-GM]

Personally i would always keep at least on DC Physical. Any i make virtual wont have any roles. Microsoft say not to make the DC with the Infrastructure Master role a virtual machine