I’ve seen a couple of vendors release backup products, specifically targeted at Hyper-V. Some solutions utilize the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer to make backups. The big question, however, is whether this type of backup is of any use to backup Domain Controllers for disaster recovery. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of issues ...

Virtualization offers huge benefits in flexibility, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. It’s an easy business case to make to any IT department nowadays. After all, Gartner claims the cost of energy outweighs the initial purchase of an x86 server in its first three years. However, most virtualization projects aren’t legacy-free: To make a ...

Designing and implementing a virtual environment on top of Hyper-V can be challenging. In the first four parts of this series I looked at the design choices and management actions regarding Active Directory in Hyper-V environments. Jorge made some interesting points as well, but one Active Directory best practice still remains to be tackled: ...

Updating environments with Hyper-V can be more of a challenge compared to updating an environment that consists of mere physical servers. Not only the workloads need regular updating, but also the Windows servers and Hyper-V servers underneath them. The challenges Hyper-V relies on a Parent Partition, whether you're using a Full installation of ...

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition offers the ability to make virtual machines highly available by leveraging failover clustering. This however is not a good idea in the case of Active Directory Domain Controllers. In this post I’ll explain why Hyper-V High Availability for Domain Controllers is not a good idea and ...

Designing and implementing a virtual environment on top of Hyper-V can be challenging. Placement of Active Directory Domain Controllers require additional consideration, especially in some Hyper-V scenario's where Active Directory membership is strictly needed. In the scenarios below the Hyper-V parent partitions ("Virtual Hosts") need ...

Domain Controllers are perfect virtualization targets, but virtualizing a Domain Controller reintroduces possibilities to mess up the Domain Controller in ways most of the Directory Services Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and other Active Directory enthusiasts have been fixing since the dawn of Active Directory. When working with virtual ...

Virtualization offers huge benefits in flexibility, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. However, some design choices need to be made towards deploying Active Directory Domain Controllers in virtual environments. Some of these choices are general choices, but some of them apply to Hyper-V enabled environments specifically. When deploying an ...