Impact of Cloning and Virtualization on Active Directory Domain Services

Customers are looking to further virtualize their environments: file servers,web servers,DNS servers,and even their domain controllers. It is clear that virtualization provides many benefits in areas such as deployment,disaster-recovery and lowering TCO. However,while virtualization offers many powerful capabilities and greatly simplifies repetitive tasks,it is a technology that must be handled with care when used in conjunction with Active Directory. In this session we review fundamental concepts within Active Directory and the impact of cloning and virtualization upon domain controllers,domain members and Windows in general. We also discuss how to best leverage virtualization and how to both mitigate problems and avoid occurrences in the first place.