Ada,
I am intrigued as to why "management" are directing you to
do this. What benefits do they percieve? Do they understand the nature of the
2K3 directory and the load 7,000 users puts on it?
This is not a criticism - just a curious thinking out loud
moment...
Personally - I wouldn't do it. Some would say a DC is a
sacred thing, not to be toyed with. Proof of concept is always good in these
scenarios... if you were to set this up in a lab, even with just two
VMWare-ed DC's, you could show the overhead this would place on the machine and
help them to understand the additional cost this will bring.
Remember, a DC that is just a DC (AD, DNS, maybe DHCP)
doesn't need to be a gutsy box - it can just be a PC rebuilt with Win2K3 server
on it. However it does need to stay up all the time.
;)
themolk.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rivera, Ada
Sent: Tuesday, 6 June 2006 9:51 PM
To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
Subject: [ActiveDir] Virtual DCsWe have a single domain forest with about 7,000 users. Currently we 8 AD regional sites and one HQ AD site. The regional sites each have a DC serving their local regional area and there are multiple DCs in our HQ site. The environment is currently running Windows 2000 SP4 and we are looking to upgrade our DCs to W2K3. The direction from management is that we will put all of our domain controllers on VM Ware when we upgrade the DCs to W2K3. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Good or Bad idea?
