How to choose an environment for a domain controller? Virtual or Physical?

Question

Active Directory

Small organization. I can not decide where to put the domain controller. On a hyper-v virtual machine or physically?
How will it be easier and more convenient?
Which option is more reliable?

Answer 1

Don't listen to everyone else :)
All servers in an organization should be virtual, except for virtualization hosts!
Horror stories will tell you, those who do not use it fully in production. Especially in terms of the fact that the host and other virtual machines start before the CD.
How it should be:
0. In the settings of virtual machines with a CD, enable forced activation after the host starts.
1. Disable the setting of time synchronization from the host to the virtual machine with CD in the properties of the virtual machine.
1a. Set up CD synchronization with the timeserver.
2. CD must be at least two.
3. CDs must be located on two different hosts and storages.
4. CD backup must occur simultaneously with Sharepoint and Exchange servers.
5. When restoring one of the CDs from a backup, it is important to take into account the state and priority of replication (starting with Win2012 and with modern backups like Veeam B & R, it is not so relevant
) on CD in case of failures should not be used anywhere else.

Answer 2

There should be two CDs, one is physical and the second is virtual
. But there are nuances if other servers have virtual ones, then the CD needs a physical one that will start before the virtuals.

Answer 3

A vivid example of unskilled use of virtual
infrastructure under DC:
How to solve the problem with the RPC service in the hyperV console?
If you want hyper-v, then at least two DCs, on different hosts with a daily full system backup.
If this is not possible, then do RAID1 on a regular machine and live in peace.

Answer 4

Easier and more convenient - virtual machines.
More reliable - this is not a matter of "virtual or physical machine", but of a number of factors. If your virtualization cluster is well-implemented, then just keep two domain controllers on two different virtualization hosts, and set their startup priority to the maximum so that they start first.
If there is no cluster, or it is designed illiterately - then yes, two domain controllers - one virtual, one physical.