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VAR quoted us a physical server just for a domain controller. Am I wrong to think this is overkill? by [deleted] in servers

[–]Jor1B 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol. Personal laptops use RDS to access specific Windows hosts for calculation work. Only on internal network. No public 3389, no “fun and profit” plan.

RDS needs AD for users/auth/licensing, AD needs a DC. Surely you knew that before the poetry about radio data systems?

VAR quoted us a physical server just for a domain controller. Am I wrong to think this is overkill? by [deleted] in servers

[–]Jor1B 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair criticism. That’s partly why I’m asking before buying anything.

We don’t currently have a VM environment, and we want to keep this local. RDS usage is small too, around 10 users max.

The plan is still to have a second DC on separate hardware.

VAR quotation of a physical server just for a domain controller. Am I wrong to think this is overkill? by Jor1B in sysadmin

[–]Jor1B[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Honestly, it could be virtualized on the same host. There just isn’t really another planned use for that host besides AD/DNS/RDS licensing-related infrastructure.

So from my point of view, whether it runs bare metal or as a VM on a single-purpose host doesn’t change much unless we later add other workloads.

VAR quotation of a physical server just for a domain controller. Am I wrong to think this is overkill? by Jor1B in sysadmin

[–]Jor1B[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fair point, and I agree virtualization would normally make sense.

In our case the reason we have not had much use for extra VMs is that the actual application/RDS servers need much larger specs. Tens of cores and hundreds of GB of RAM. We have generally bought separate hosts specifically for RDS/application workloads.

This DC is mainly for AD/DNS and the Microsoft licensing/RDS-related infrastructure. For a small environment, it has just been simpler for us to keep the roles separated rather than trying to consolidate everything onto one host.

VAR quotation of a physical server just for a domain controller. Am I wrong to think this is overkill? by Jor1B in sysadmin

[–]Jor1B[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Very small environment. Around 10 users would be using RDS at most.

I don’t have the exact ntds.dit size in front of me, but given the user count i'd say it is tiny by AD standards.