Consider the following best practices to optimize the availability of essential services in your Hyper-V and PowerStore environment.
- Configure at least one domain controller as a physical host with local disk, or as a VM on a Hyper-V host with local disk.
- Run at least one domain controller independent of SAN storage so it will continue to provide essential services if external storage is unavailable. Essential services include AD user authentication, cluster authentication, DNS, and DHCP.
- Place a management host or VM (jump box) in the environment that remains accessible regardless of the state of the storage fabric or SAN resources. Install critical management tools on this resource to aid with administration, troubleshooting, monitoring, and recovery.
Domain controller placement
Do not place all domain controller VMs on the same Hyper-V cluster. If the cluster service depends on AD authentication to start, an outage of the Hyper-V cluster will result in an AD service interruption and a recovery conundrum for the administrator. Recovery might require the following steps:
- Manually recover a domain controller VM outside of the Hyper-V cluster and bring it online.
- With AD available, Hyper-V cluster services can now authenticate and start.
- Redesign the environment so that at least one domain controller does not depend on Hyper-V cluster services starting first.