We are implementing here at the University KVM virtualization for our servers and services and i was wondering if anyone virtualized domain cotrollers to KVM. Does anyone done this before? Any advice?
9 thoughts on - Domain Controllers Virtualized KVM
Yes, we have done this for PoC. For PoC, we have not stress tested that. But one thing for sure that it was not putting too much load on host OS.
If you are planning to run in production then keep a count on RAM, Disk I/O
and CPU
of that virtual machine.
Dear Lucian,
I am already running Windows OS and use virtio drivers, but not for AD. Did you implement PCI passthrough for the disk access?
I have not implemented anything, virtio is enough for our use case (< 100 machines).
HTH
Lucian
Hi,
Our domain controller and our file/print server (Windows Server 2008 R2)
are running as KVM guests under CentOS 6 since 2011 and we didn’t have any issues with them. I use the virtio network and disk drivers on the virtual machines. The performance of the domain controller is very good (more than what we need in fact) but we have a small network, about 40 desktops and 30
laptops. I use local storage on the KVM host for the virtual disks, they are in QCOW2 format. (make sure to use metadata preallocation when you create the disks if you use QCOW2)
—
If you need to support restoring your Windows domain controller VM from a snapshot or you need to live migrate it then you need Server 2012 and a hypervisor that provides a VM generation ID.
I don’t believe KVM supports this and it’s only available in Xen in the upcoming Xen 4.5 release.
David
Samba also works fine in virtualization. I’ve been publishing tools to build Samba 4.1, capable of acting as a fairly drop-in replacement for Active Directory, for RHEL 6 (and thus compatible with CentOS and Scientific Linux 6) over at My toolkit is over at https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo.
If you’ve worked your way up to CentOS 7, RHEL 7, etc., Samba 4.1.1 is built-in and much easier to update as needed.
Le 16/10/2014 14:21, Nico Kadel-Garcia a
I’d forgotten that was still going on for the upstream Samba. The one at Sernet, available at http://www.enterprisesamba.com/news/, may be more capable. I’ve not personally tried it on CentOS 7.
9 thoughts on - Domain Controllers Virtualized KVM
Hi,
We currently run AD virtualised (Xenserver, but it shouldn’t really matter). When running Windows on KVM make sure to use virtio (paravirt) devices for improved performance. Drivers here:
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-0.1-81.iso
HTH
Lucian
Hi,
Yes, we have done this for PoC. For PoC, we have not stress tested that. But one thing for sure that it was not putting too much load on host OS.
If you are planning to run in production then keep a count on RAM, Disk I/O
and CPU
of that virtual machine.
Dear Lucian,
I am already running Windows OS and use virtio drivers, but not for AD. Did you implement PCI passthrough for the disk access?
I have not implemented anything, virtio is enough for our use case (< 100 machines). HTH Lucian
Hi,
Our domain controller and our file/print server (Windows Server 2008 R2)
are running as KVM guests under CentOS 6 since 2011 and we didn’t have any issues with them. I use the virtio network and disk drivers on the virtual machines. The performance of the domain controller is very good (more than what we need in fact) but we have a small network, about 40 desktops and 30
laptops. I use local storage on the KVM host for the virtual disks, they are in QCOW2 format. (make sure to use metadata preallocation when you create the disks if you use QCOW2)
—
If you need to support restoring your Windows domain controller VM from a snapshot or you need to live migrate it then you need Server 2012 and a hypervisor that provides a VM generation ID.
I don’t believe KVM supports this and it’s only available in Xen in the upcoming Xen 4.5 release.
David
Samba also works fine in virtualization. I’ve been publishing tools to build Samba 4.1, capable of acting as a fairly drop-in replacement for Active Directory, for RHEL 6 (and thus compatible with CentOS and Scientific Linux 6) over at My toolkit is over at https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo.
If you’ve worked your way up to CentOS 7, RHEL 7, etc., Samba 4.1.1 is built-in and much easier to update as needed.
Le 16/10/2014 14:21, Nico Kadel-Garcia a
I’d forgotten that was still going on for the upstream Samba. The one at Sernet, available at http://www.enterprisesamba.com/news/, may be more capable. I’ve not personally tried it on CentOS 7.