WINS on Virtual server

[ndmuser]

I need to add second WINS server in our local network because the old server is dead. The first WINS server is working OK on the physical win2K3 box. Can I install WINS server on VM? Or it will create more troubles running in VI?

Thank you for advise!

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Works fine for me... Depends on network load, cpu load, and disk load. But mine is hardly used so is a perfect candidate for a VM. Do a little analysis of the existing WINS box first.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[williamarrata]

We run multiple WINS servers in our VM environment without issue. It all depends on your LAN and environment and jst like Texiwill said, do some due diligence first.

Hope that helped.

[RParker]

Why WINS instead of just simple DNS? ALL Windows versions can fully utilize DNS. WINS is horrible to maintain, and it just supports Microsoft, so I would use something universal...

[polysulfide]

Have you ever tried to build a multi-site AD infrastructure with Exchange, etc, without WINS. It wont work. It SHOULD work but it doesn't. All sorts of problems. WINS is a required service still. You would probably be fine removeing after the fact but even building the domains and exchange organizations fail if WINS isn't configured even if DNS is perfect (in my experience)

If it was useful, give me credit

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/polysulfide

VI From Concept to Implementation

[ndmuser]

You are completely right! This is why I am still using WINS in my AD structure.

Thanks!

[Rumple]

I manage an international environment with multiple forests, multiple sites and no WINS. I haven't implemented WINS in any environment since NT4...

Typically people have problems in multi domain/multi site environments because their DNS chaining is not setup correctly or they are not adding search suffixes correctly so they end up with dns resolution issues.

To answer the original question, unless you are trying to manage thousands of systems, WINS shouldn't add any load at all.

[polysulfide]

Did you build the environment?

In general I agree with you.

Building multi-site multi-forest infrastructures, I have seen issues where only NetBIOS name resolution would work. DNS configured properly, short names resolvable by DNS.

This is specifically when installing exchange 2003 where the first server is in a different name space than the forest root. I was able to back WINS out afterward but it was required to make everything happy initially.