NAS as secondary Domain Controller, Yes or No?

[bernard038]

Hi All,

The small company my wife and i started a few years ago is growing. And in a few months we will be going on our first holiday since we started this venture. Currently we have one Windows Server essentials 2012 r2 as our DC. As you might understand, when this machine crashes during our holiday, the holiday will be short and not very nice. So it is time for a secondary DC and i have a few options:

1. Buy this HP Microserver, a server 2012 standard license and use this as a secondary DC.
2. Buy a QNAP or Synology NAS, and use the NAS as a secondary DC.

Both solutions have their pro's and cons, using a NAS might be somewhat cheaper, and the additional storage can be used as a backup. A server 2012 DC might be more attractive as i can use options such as DHCP-failover (or is this also possible in a mixed SRV2012 / NAS environment?).

I am looking forward to hear your thoughts and ideas!

Cheers, b,

 

[sfx2000]

If one is running SRV2012 as a DC, it's probably also running Active Directory which can complicate things - Samba can do the DC, but integration into an AD environment as a peer can be a challenge...

My thoughts are bring up another SRV2012 instance, and configure as a high-availability config - Active/Active with sync - gives room for expansion/growth and you still get the failover...

 

[bernard038]

My thoughts are bring up another SRV2012 instance

Thanks! At this moment i am leaning towards the more expensive solution, a SRV 2012 machine as a second DC in a failover cluster, jumping in when the first DC is unavailable.