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Advice on Hyper-V cluster

We've just purchased a SAN solution and want to migrate virtual servers hosted locally on 5 Server 2008 R2 bare metal servers to a hyper-v cluster.

Just looking for a bit of advice. One of the servers will have to serve as a DC to the other 4 cluster nodes. Is it best practice to have 2 DCs in this setup? Also, should I split the 4 remaining servers and create 2 clusters or have 4 nodes in one cluster? I'd appreciate any help/comments.

Mahesh

If all five servers are high end servers, you can make all of them hyper-v hosts and part of failover cluster
You must put TWO domain controllers because by having single DC you will face single point of failure
You need to put one DC as virtual instance each on any TWO cluster nodes
Also in DC vm properties select "Always start this virtual machine automatically" in case of unexpected reboot of host.

Its good if you can deploy one DC on physical server but not mandatory

Since you have Five servers, even if you deploy MS Exchange on TWO nodes as VM still you can keep File share witness on any of remaining three nodes to avoid cluster failure

Do not take snapshot of virtualized DC
Also do not forget to keep both DC as primary dns and alternate dns in tcp/ip properties of all virtual \ physical servers

Alternatively you can have Four node cluster depending upon your needs

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kevinhsieh

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Mahesh

You can have Hyper-V FOUR node cluster and keep 1 physical server reserved for backup software to backup your HYPER-V SAN storage and Hyper-V configuration.