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dcadler

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Best Practice for Hyper-V Hosts in domains

I have 3 Hyper-V hosts servers that I recently upgraded to Windows Server 2012. These hosts run the majority of my domain servers as VMs. I have a primary DC in a separate physical box that also provides my DHCP. The 2nd DC is a VM.

Each Hyper-V host server has 2 NICs. Originally, I set up the Hyper-V host servers with the Management NIC on a private subnet that was isolated from the domain and on each virtual switch, I unchecked the "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter". My understanding was that it was best practice to keep the Hyper-V hosts isolated from the domain for security purposes.

Now, I am reading many posts where the Hyper-V host servers are actually joined to the same domain that the hosted VMs are in. As I understand it, this is done to facilitate easier Hyper-V host management.

Which is the current best practice approach?

I would like the Hyper-V hosts on the domain so that I could manage them from the same workstation that I use to manager the server VMs and other domain resources. I could also team the two network adapters in each Hyper-V server for better network performance/resilience.

Thanks,

Dave
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Philip Elder
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Hi.

"isolated from the domain for security purposes" - now what should that mean in detail? Please link that statement you read. What should get more secure because it's not on the domain and why?
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dcadler

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I decided to add teaming to the server NICs and to keep the Hyper-V hosts on a separate VLAN as stand alone rather than domain connected. I also teams the adapters on that VLAN to allow me to more easily move VMs from one server to another as needed. Thanks for all of your help.