I do plan to have windows 2008 AD on a virtual server on HA by having replication. Is it recomended to have the primary server on physical hardware or on a virtual server.Mathew Muthama MCP, MSCA

We use Hyper-V virtualization for all of our DC's (including the FSMO) and have not encountered any issues yet, however, I will say that there are arguments for and against it. The nice thing about virtualization is that -- depending on your setup -- it has very good HA, failover, and migration options which really reduces administrative overhead. The only difficulty I've encountered with virtualization is that if you're inexperienced with the technology (especially Hyper-V) you can run into some serious issues that result in protracted outages. Some issues that we've encountered with Hyper-V on the whole have been: Spontaneous reboots due to incompatible server CPU architecture (which Microsoft did release a patch for) Snapshot consolidation causing the available disk space to run out. This one took us by surprise as we'd deleted the snapshot subtree months earlier and thought that it had already consolidated the snapshots. It turned out that it hadn't and when we powered the guest off for some time, it started the consolidation, ran out of available space, and wouldn't allow us to power it on until we found a way to provide more space for the consolidation to complete. Poor performance due to either under or over allocation of hardware resources So, the moral of the story here is that you can do it, but make sure you establish the stability of the guests and that you're skilled and trained in your chosen virtualization platform.

Virtualization is supported. Review the following documents first. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/virtual_active_directory_domain_controller_virtualization_hyperv(WS.10).aspx http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888794Santhosh Sivarajan | MCTS, MCSE (W2K3/W2K/NT4), MCSA (W2K3/W2K/MSG), CCNA, Network+ Houston, TX Blogs - http://blogs.sivarajan.com/ Articles - http://www.sivarajan.com/publications.html Twitter: @santhosh_sivara - http://twitter.com/santhosh_sivara This posting is provided AS IS with no warranties,and confers no rights.