Active Diretory

[psb1963]

Should there be a domain controller other than mailserver0?  My prime client is having trouble accessing the AD DC, so I just wanted to confirm that mailserver SHOULD be my only DC.

Thanks

[douglasarcidino]

I just wanted to clarify, are you asking if you should have more than one DC in your environment? Is this mail server running MS Exchange?

[jamesz08]

Each tile will have a single domain controller.  No other DC are required.

[psb1963]

I do not have nor did I think I need a separate DC. This is the mailserver0 Workload VM on my host running Exchange for the test.

Thanks

[douglasarcidino]

For the purpose of testing, you could get away with running ADDS and Exchange on the same box but in production it would not be a great idea. I always recommend having a DC as its own VM and Microsoft recommends the same. If you can pump like 20GB of RAM into your test VM, it should work but I would not recommend having it running on the same box.

[jamesz08 · Accepted solution]

This is for VMmark, a benchmark which requires a very specific configuration.  You cannot add memory or move services around, you need to adhere to the benchmarking guide.

[psb1963]

I absolutely agree on the best practice of not mixing your DC with other workloads in a production environment.  This is strictly a small test environment that will never be live or even allowed access to the outside network.  I originally wasn't even going to implement AD; however, VMMarks needs it for the Exchange test, so I was following the VMMark guide and had set up AD on the mailserver.  Thank you both James and Douglas for your confirmations and will continue trouble shooting my AD problem knowing that I was correct in assuming my prime client is supposed to be accessing the AD on mailserver.