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Hi Everyone,

[Im planning to transfer my PDC(VM) into a physical server]

3 months ago, our PDC physical machine encountered a hardware failure and needs to be replaced. We do have a secondary DC but since we are unable to buy a new one within a months time i decided to create another DC(VM) using Hyper-V and promote it.

Now we do have a new physical server and can put my PDC there. Im thinking if it is okay to just do a full backup of our PDC(currently a VM) and load the image there to our new server or it is better to create again a new DC and promote it?

2 Spice ups
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In my opinion the restore method is NOT the way to go. Only restore a DC from backup if you absolutely have to.

Better practice would be to just do a fresh install, promote, transfer roles, and demote the old DC.

My question is why do you not want your DC to be a VM? Why use an entire physical host just to run a DC? The whole point of virtualization is to not waste resources that will just sit idle most of the time.

Do you have a reason that you cant leave your DCs as virtual? I havent had a physical DC in a t least a decade.

5 Spice ups
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Thank you for your opinion. :blush:

the server where my current DC(VM) is an old server already and the model is end of service thats why im planning to trasfer it to a physical server which was our originally setup before.

Though yes, i can transfer it still as a VM. Im thinking because i will need to renew antivirus for both VM and host

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I don’t know what your org size is, but if I have my way I’ll never have another physical server deployment again. Physical servers run hypervisors, and everything is a VM. What really makes it come together though is shared storage because then you can move VMs as needed, do maintenance on hosts without down time, and VMs take seconds vs minutes to reboot because there’s no hardware POST to sit through.

3 Spice ups
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As others said, don’t try to restore it back to physical - build a new DC and transfer the roles, however, I see no reason to move it back to physical either.

If your host is old, use the new hardware to host a couple of VMs, bump it’s spec up and replace your old host (or one of them).

Physical servers bring with them many more problems than they solve.

4 Spice ups
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Bring the new system up as a standalone, DCPROM it into the domain. Then you can assign the PDC emulator role to the system and/or additional roles.

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Yes. And make sure it is still a virtual machine.

1 Spice up
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What OS is the DCs ?? There are no more PDC or BDC as all are DCs. Then you should ahve at least 2 DCs

If you need another DC on physical server, just install the OS and promote to a DC and join the current Domain. Remember to add the other DCs IP address into the DNS server IP (last IP being 127.0.0.1)

2 Spice ups
9

Why on earth would you want to give up on the benefits of running VM’s? Also no such thing as a PDC, all DC’s are fully authoritative in Active Directory. Either way the best method would be to spin up a new DC and transfer the FSMO roles if the one you are replacing is holding them. Once you know it is working properly you can decom the old DC.

4 Spice ups