I’ve had a couple of emails in the past few days about Domain Controllers and Virtual Machine, so I guess it’s time for another post :)

Regardless of your choice of Virtualization technology, if you are running Domain Controllers in a Virtual Machine, you should really pay attention to:
KB 888794 Considerations when hosting DC in virtual environments.  naturally, this should align nicely with your Virtualization planning — you have done some palnning right?

The biggest problem is going to be time syncronization with the physical host, and any sort of undo/snap shots, so you should switch these off.  Under Virtual Server you disable time sync by:

  • In the Virtual Machines pane, click Configure, and then select the virtual machine that you want to change. 
  • In the Configuration pane, click Virtual Machine Additions.
  • Click to clear the Host time synchronization check box, and then click OK

I’ve posted some infromation here “Can I run Domain Controller’s (DC) inside a Virtual Machine?”
If you are using VMware, then check out that mighty fine session paper “TAC 9710 - Virtualizing a Windows Active Directory Domain Infrastructure”

I’ve also been getting some questions on P2V of DCs as well.  I guess people are starting to get serious about getting rid of older machines.
Anyway, I’ve never been a fan of using P2V to convert an exisiting DCs.  I always prefer to build a new DC with DC Promo.  You can restore a system state into a Virtual machine, and there are some more details “Can I restore my Domain Controller AD into a Virtual Machine?”

I think that’s it for now, if you want to know more drop me a comment I guess, just thought I share some more of that virtual machine lovin’