Mastering Active Directory - Second Edition

Physical or virtual domain controllers

Most of the workloads we have in modern infrastructures are virtualized. Domain controllers can also be virtualized; however, depending on the virtualization vendor, the best practices will be different. Therefore, if you plan to deploy virtual domain controllers, refer to your software vendor and find out what the recommendations for virtual domain controllers are. The guidelines in this section will focus on the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform.

It isn't recommended that you use only virtual domain controllers. In fact, it is recommended that you balance it between physical and virtual domain controllers for availability and integrity. This is especially applicable if virtual domain controllers ...