Tech Ed presentation by our (or at least my) good friend Deano.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/SIA205
I haven’t made it all the way through the presentation yet, I choked a bit when he said virtual DCs were completely safe in Windows Server 2012. That is one of those things that comes back and haunts you as famous last words… ;) FWIW, I don’t put the completely safe label on anything unless there is nothing that can happen or that you can do to make it break. Not many things you can point at that fit that description.
Dean gave a presentation or two at TEC which covered what was added to make virtual DCs ‘safe’. He was very clear about the hypervisor requirements, the scenarios they solved for, the logic supporting them. He was also not shy and actually went out of his way to specifically detail what they did not solve for. Dean clearly did not want anyone leaving the session believing the virtual DC safeguards will save us from any and all scenarios.
The short is that Server 2012 makes virtual DCs safe’r’, with some pre-reqs, and some caveats.
Excellent, that is exactly what the message should be. It still all comes down to having bullet proof processes and knowledgeable support folks which if that was already in place in an org, and not just an ideal to which they would like to attain, then they are already pretty safe with vDCs. Sadly, many/most orgs, don’t really have as good a process and technical folks as they would like to believe. That was and perhaps still is not their goal as they were looking for the least expensive support, not the best.
I was in that session. I agree: Dean is a great speaker and presenter. I also didn’t realize how many “bugs” were in 2008 R2 AD services (he mentions some of them), other than the RID pool depletion issue.