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You only need to worry about a few things when you’re deciding to virtualize a service. But what happens when Active Directory is the target service? You know that you get the best security by joining your Hyper-V host to the domain, but doesn’t that make these two critical roles interdependent? Many people refer to that conundrum as Hyper-V’s “chicken and egg” problem. Fortunately, no such problem actually exists. You can easily and safely join your Hyper-V host to a domain even if it hosts the only domain controller. This video will introduce the concerns around domain controller virtualization. It will then demonstrate a complete virtualized domain controller deployment. You’ll see what happens when things don’t work correctly and how to handle it.
Feeback or Questions?
If you still in doubt about the myths posed here, send me a message in the comment section below and I’ll be more than happy to discuss it with you.
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Eric Siron
3 thoughts on "[VIDEO] Hyper-V Masterclass – Debunking Virtual Domain Controller Myths"
Hi Eric,
Firstly, thank you for producing this video! I have found it very informative and instructive on avoiding pitfalls and debunking myths with self-contained Active Directory deployments within Hyper-V.
One thing did occur to me though throughout your video; does this video rely on the Domain Controller (Or any VM it controls) being held on a local hard drive? In environments with iSCSI connections from the Hyper-V host to shared storage for example, I have found that guest machines will not automatically start as soon as the Hyper-V host comes back up where the auto-startup timer is set to 0, as it takes a few minutes’ generally for the iSCSI connections to re-establish.
Is this just an oddity of my own experiences, or have you found this to be the case also and this example is concerning a guest running on local storage?
Great question!
I always place virtualized domain controllers on internal storage. With so much depending on them, I want them to be the simplest, least dependent virtual machines. Also, Active Directory does not benefit if its containing virtual machine(s) is/are made highly available. So, local storage in unclustered VMs is the way to go.
What you’re experiencing makes perfect sense. If you wait long enough, the VMs will eventually start. But, you want them to start right away. I’d move them local.
Wonderful, thanks for your response! This article helps me greatly with a personal project consisting of a small-form-factor server which I want to install Server 2016 on and run a DC, Fileserver and Firewall VM from. Much appreciated!