“Money is the root of all evil”
I have a customer who has a SQL 2005 cluster in the DMZ zone. However, to save cost, they installed Active Directory into the clustered nodes since SQL 2005 Cluster needs domain accounts in order to function. Everything runs fine until they decided to run another SQL cluster joining to this Domain. Problems surfaced when this 2nd set of SQL cluster couldn’t fail over as the SQL services couldn’t be started.
Microsoft has released their statements that they do not support installing SQL 2005 cluster on a domain controller (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915846/en-us). Nevertheless, there will still be someone who will try to do it and hope for the best that it works and hurray, they managed to save cost without having to buy & maintain another 2 sets of DC. But… when problem occurs… well, you know the story.
This sets me on another track. What if we were to set up a Hyper-V or VMWare DC in each of the cluster nodes? Would this work? And since the DC and SQL Cluster are now “logically separated”, will Microsoft support this architecture? Hope someone who had done this and gain MS support can let us know. Thanks in advance.