Announcing the latest addition to our series of prescriptive guidance for virtualizing Business Critical Applications on the VMware vSphere platform.
Microsoft Windows Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) is one of the most pervasive Directory Services platforms in the market today. Because of the importance of AD DS to the operation and availability of other critical services, applications and processes, the stability and availability of AD DS itself is usually very important to most organizations.
Although the “Virtualization First” concept is becoming a widely-accepted operational practice in the enterprise, many IT shops are still reluctant to completely virtualize Domain Controllers. The most conservative organizations have an absolute aversion to domain controller virtualization while the more conservative organizations choose to virtualize a portion of the AD DS environment and retain a portion on physical hardware. Empirical data indicate that the cause of this opposition to domain controller virtualization is a combination of historical artifacts, misinformation, lack of experience in virtualization, or fear of the unknown.
The new Guide – Virtualizing Active Directory Domain Services On VMware vSphere® – is intended to help the reader overcome this inhibition by clearly addressing both the legacy artifacts and the new advancements in Microsoft Windows that help ameliorate the past deficiencies and make AD DS more virtualization-friendly – and safer.
With the release of Windows Server 2012, new features alleviate many of the legitimate concerns that administrators have about virtualizing AD DS. These new features, the latest versions of VMware® vSphere®, and recommended practices help achieve 100 percent virtualization of AD DS.
The Guide includes a number of best practice guidelines for administrators to help them optimally and safely deploy AD DS on VMware vSphere.
The recommendations in this guide are not specific to a particular set of hardware or to the size and scope of a specific AD DS implementation. The examples and considerations in this document provide guidance, but do not represent strict design requirements.
Similar to other “Best Practices” releases from VMware, this Guide is intended to serve as your companion and primary reference guidepost if you have any responsibility planning, designing, implementing and operating a virtualized Active Directory Domain Services instance in a VMware vSphere infrastructure.
This guide assumes a basic knowledge and understanding of vSphere and AD DS.
Architectural staff can use this document to understand the design considerations for deploying a virtualized AD DS environment on vSphere.
Engineers and administrators can use this document as a catalog of technical capabilities.
Management staff and process owners can use this document to help model business processes that take advantage of the savings and operational efficiencies achieved with virtualization.
You can download Virtualizing Active Directory Domain Services On VMware vSphere® here.
