Hyperv as a DC

[bart21]

Hi

 

Just want peoples opinion on this one.

 

On a couple of sites i have visited recently they have server 2008r2 installed on a physical box, they then install hyperv. They then promote the physical box to being a DC.

 

Surely a physical hyperv host as a DC is a bad idea? i think it is, if you need to reboot that dc to fix an issue or install another role, e.g IIS then you have to reboot all the virtuals aswell. Whereas if it was a virtual DC it could just be rebooted.

 

nick

[Hightower]

It's not recommened to run your forest root on a hyper-v - it might make sense in your head (it did to me 5 months ago) but Microsoft best practice says to have at least 1 physical DC, preferably the forest root.

 

Our setup here is a physical box as the forest root, and then two VM's (on seperate hardware) as companion DC's.

[3s-gtech]

^^Same as above, though as we have a parent and with a child domain I have two physical DCs.

[bart21]

yer but would those physical DC's be the hyperv box its self?

 

To me that is crazy, i installed IIS on the DC and had to wait till after school to reboot it because i also had to reboot all the guests, such as sims, exchange aswell, whereas if the hyperv server was just hyperv and all dc's were virtual i coukld reboot them whenever i want.

 

nick

[sparkeh]

Yes, IMO having the physical Hyper-V Host as a DC is nuts.

I have one physical host (non DC or even on the domain) running three VM servers which are DCs.

[bart21]

@sparkeh

 

this is how i agree it should be setup.

[jamesfed]

Hyper-V should always be a dedicated role on a dedicated server with no other roles installed.

At worst maybe System Centre Virtual Machine manager could be installed as well but nothing else.

 

Key reasons for this are that virtual hosts should be as locked down as tight as possible (most certainly no IIS running!) to avoid security problems and someone getting a hold of all those nice VHDs with all your data on....

 

Microsoft says you should always have one physical DC, although we don't do this here (we use local storage (no SAN!) on both our virtual hosts and each has a full DC running inside a VM) it certainly is the best way to go.

[bart21]

I agree, however i had no choice, both the DC's were the 2 hyper v hosts and the website had to run on a DC.

 

I did send the head an email outlining my advice so that my back was covered

 

nick

[jamesb]

Yes, IMO having the physical Hyper-V Host as a DC is nuts.

I have one physical host (non DC or even on the domain) running three VM servers which are DCs.

 

Out of curiousity - where's the advantage in this, since if you get a hardware failure you're going to lose all three DCs anyway? I'm just curious if there's a specific reason you have it set up this way?

 

 

I agree, however i had no choice, both the DC's were the 2 hyper v hosts and the website had to run on a DC.

 

I just want to confirm that I didn't misread this. The website had to run on a DC?

[mthomas08]

It's not recommened to run your forest root on a hyper-v - it might make sense in your head (it did to me 5 months ago) but Microsoft best practice says to have at least 1 physical DC, preferably the forest root.

 

Our setup here is a physical box as the forest root, and then two VM's (on seperate hardware) as companion DC's.

 

Yep this. I currently have 1 Dedicated GC which does nothing else its a new fancy little box - nothing mental but has enough cover/redundancy. I also have two other servers as GCs and I plan on scrapping one of them for a SAN box - then rebuild it as another GC with shared storage.

[Trapper]

Which is great if you're a secondary school or college with all that money over the years.

 

I only have one decent physical server, but the expectations to run more complex products such as TMG and Sharepoint Foundation. I have to run HyperV on the DC, as well, I haven't got anything else. With budgets the way they are at the moment, this isn't going to change for a while