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Re: Should HyperV under DC or DC under HyperV

 
KennySim-SG
Occasional Visitor

Should HyperV under DC or DC under HyperV

As we are going to setup DL-360p Gen 8, some IT guys said DC/AD is OK to work under HyperV, but some strongly advise that HyperV must works under DC/AD.

 

All feedbacks are most welcome.

 

Thanks in advance.

2 REPLIES 2
waaronb
Respected Contributor

Re: Should HyperV under DC or DC under HyperV

I have no problem running a domain controller on a virtual machine.  There are a couple of things to consider though:

 

1) will the Hyper-V host machine be a domain member?  If so, make sure you have other domain controllers on other hosts, otherwise you may have a "chicken & egg" problem where the host machine has problems because it can't start some services up that may depend on domain accounts being able to authenticate.  Always make sure you have at least one domain controller up and running.  If you ever find yourself in a situation where all your hosts are down and you can't bring a virtual DC online, there are workarounds but it won't be fun for you.  Consider having one physical domain controller if you think it's worthwhile.

 

2) If the host machine is domain joined, make sure it does NOT get it's time from the domain controller *or* make sure the virtual DC does NOT get it's time from the host.  If a domain joined server is getting it's time from the domain controller, and that domain controller is getting it's time from the Hyper-V host, you can wind up with a runaway clock where it keeps getting further and further out of sync.

 

For me, we're not doing any clustering of our hosts (we're just doing non-domain replication) and none of our hosts are domain-joined.  All of our hosts get their time synced from NTP and the virtual domain controllers can get their time from the host system which should be accurate.

 

KennySim-SG
Occasional Visitor

Re: Should HyperV under DC or DC under HyperV

Thanks, Waaronb.

 

FYI, we want to have both DC/AD and Hyper-V (to run SAP) in one physical server - DL-360p Gen8 which has Windows Server 2012 R2.

 

Possible to spend some time to look through the following article and comments?

http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/reasons-not-to-make-hyper-v-a-domain-controller/