Re: Windows Server 2008 cluster nodes as Domain Controllers

On Jan 17, 7:04 pm, John Doe <John...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Thanks for the replies Russ and Ryan. I appreciate the input, having little
experience in this area of clustering myself.

Have to second Russ's comments.  High Availability is a complete mind-set,
not just getting something to function minimally.

Using DCs as cluster nodes is simply not a best practice and not recommended
at all (for many reasons).  If cost is at the heart of this (as it quite
often is), you must re-examine the actual committment to implementing HA
properly.

Ryan

I understand your comments however you must realise that not all situations
fit the complete Microsoft framework. And wanting to run cluster nodes as DCs
may in some situations not have anything to do with lack of money. Far from
it. I want to run clusters across a spanned network in two separate
datacenters with two separate SANs.

I want to move a heavily used resource (MicrosoftExchange) into the HA
space. However, the currentExchangeservers (not clustered) are DCs. This is
required in my company's situation. The workstations are not part of the AD
domain, which must be more common that Microsoft think. The AD andExchange
Admins (my group) have no control over workstations, so we can't dictate that
they be members of the domain. In fact, working at a University you soon
learn that IT can't dictate anything!

Reason for being DCs? As the workstations aren't members of the domain, when
the client launches Outlook the local account and password is passed to theExchangeserver, which can't authenticate the user based on the domain. So
theExchangeserver checks its own user (local) database, which is a full
copy of the domain! The user account and password match and Outlook launches
without an issue. [pass-through authentication].

The issue, if we can't haveExchangecluster nodes be DCs, is we can have HA
(which only comes into play during a, hopefully infrequent, outage/disaster)
or user convenience (every time Outlook is launched). When "management" is
asked which one they want the answer is always the same; forget the cluster.

Any comments appreciated.

John

It sounds like you should probably be doing POP3 or IMAP4 mail instead
of using Exchange with a MAPI client for anyone not in the domain.
That should eliminate the need you describe to install Exchange on a
DC. If you are a University, you may seriously want to check out
http://www.google.com/a/edu/ as an alternative.

David A. Bermingham, MCSE
Director of Product Management
http://www.steeleye.com
.

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