Monday, June 13, 2011

Considering Domain Controllers on Virtual Environment.

Planning Considerations for Virtualized Domain Controllers most concerns and pointers have been discussed on the fallowing KB#888794. I have decided to post some of the highlights  from fallowing article.

IMO if passible at the least implementing one Physical DC make sense. Sizing the Domain controller correctly makes difference. The correct among of CPU, Memory and sufficient HD space need to be provided. Considering Proper AD excusing from AV scanning is also important.

Remember healthy  Dc will translate as healthy applications. Exchange Server is one of the most famous application utilize Active Directory heavy.  One thing I have witnessed over years , having issues with AD will cause all other applications to suffer this includes slowness and poor performance and translates as bad user experience.

Main pointer with Virtualization

  • Lingering objects,
  • DNS Considerations,
  • Backup Issues,
  • USN Rollback issues.

An effort to boot with the latest zone contents, the Microsoft DNS Server service waits 15 or more minutes for Active Directory to inbound replicate before loading an AD-integrated DNS zone.

Virtual host computers should not point to virtualized DNS Server running on the local virtual host compute

use System state backup for Active directory , do not use “snapshot”

USN Issues

When a USN rollback occurs, modifications to objects and attributes that occur on one domain controller do not replicate to other domain controllers in the forest. Because replication partners believe that they have an up-to-date copy of the Active Directory database, monitoring and troubleshooting tools such as Repadmin.exe do not report any replication errors

Things to consider when you host Active Directory domain controllers in virtual hosting environments
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888794

USN issues
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=875495

Deployment Considerations for Virtualized Domain Controllers
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd348449%28WS.10%29.aspx

Respectfully,
Oz Casey, Dedeal

MVP Exchange Server
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +
http://smtp25.blogspot.com/ (Blog)
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