Hi,
I am a fairly experienced admin, have done a good bit of work with Hyper-V (and XenServer and VMWare), and currently have an unusual (at least for me) project/situation to deal with.
The client is running two older, but beefy HP servers, and a decent HP SAN with them. The servers are on 2012 R2. The former admin has installed Hyper-V and five virtual machines, but here's the clincher: He also set up SQl and various applications natively on the Host OS, across both servers. Then he put the entire assembly (DCs, the native SQL instances, Exchange, Apps, shared storage) into a failover cluster.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, this configuration is neither recommended nor supported by MS (or any admins I've talked to). Apart from that, there are significant actual performance and connectivity issues (DCOM, RPC errors) to contend with. It's my job to to fix this.
I would normally like to start over on a couple of fresh servers, but that's not possible for various reasons. The idea now is to:
- Take one of the servers out of the cluster, wipe it clean, reinstall the OS w. Hyper-V,
- Build new VMs for the various roles required (DC, SQL, Apps, etc.).
- Join VMs to the existing domain, migrate SQL and other app data, and go live with the new server.
- Bring down and wipe/rebuild the other server.
- Create a new failover cluster with both servers.
I should mention that I will also be adding a third small server to act only as DC for the physical hosts. Right now, they are on the same domain as the VMs, with one of the VMs acting as DC. Not sure what the guy was thinking...? anyway, the hosts will be on their own domain moving forward.
If anyone can offer insights and opinions on this situation, and whether this rough plan seems viable, I would very much appreciate it. Thanks in advance,
Oliver W.