I work for a managed service provider (MSP), and I've noticed that all the clients I've worked with only operate a single domain controller (DC). I'm curious, is it typical for smaller businesses to have two DCs? Are these usually two distinct physical servers, or can they just run as two virtual machines on a single server? How do other people manage this setup?
5 Answers
Having redundancy for DCs, DHCP, and DNS is crucial since the failure of any of these can significantly impact business operations. It's worth investing in at least two to avoid those risks.
From my experience at an MSP, most small customers are now fully on the cloud. But if a business needs one DC, it makes sense to have two to ensure solid reliability. That's always been our rule.
Typically, most of our 100+ customers have at least two DCs, especially if they’re running Active Directory. It’s common to see them set up geographically apart to ensure availability.
For minimum high availability, I suggest at least three DCs. Having only two makes it risky—if one goes down, you’re left with a single point of failure.
In our case, we run three DCs, all as VMs on three different physical boxes; that adds an extra layer of safety.
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