I've spend all morning looking at many posts here in the community and reading up on VMware KB's and Microsoft TechNet regarding the conversion of DC's.
I'm posting this because it seems my scenario is a bit unique and wanted community input.
We have 2 domains, internal and one in our DMZ environment. I know what I'm about to describe may not be best practices but in my defense it was already setup this way when I got here.
We have a separate domain in the DMZ that's got only 1 DC and it's running an old version of SharePoint called WSS 2.0. This site is used by external customers to access this site. It's running on old hardware that I'm interested in virtualizing. I have vSphere 4.1 and ESX 4.1 host servers, one cluster in my DMZ and one in my separate internal AD domain. For this issue, the internal AD domain is not the problem, so I'll just discuss the DMZ one.
I ran the Guided Consolidation and it came back with a confidence of HIGH and 5 stars but when I attempted to move forward with consolidation I got a generic error message within my vSphere Client running on my workstation. I extracted the Error Package but it's a bit difficult to decipher on what exactly is the problem. Question #1 is what do I need to look for within these logs to tell me what the problem is?
When I ran the Guided Consolidation I gave it specific domain admin account credentils for that domain, and all ran fine. I noticed that when I try running a recommended or manual consolidation that it also lists my domain admin account credentials for the vSphere/vCenter side of things and I'm wondering if this is what's causing the problem? I wouldn't think it would be an issue since I can create VM's just fine in that environment and still manage it from within the internal domain, etc.
Anyway, I know that building a new VM DC, transferring roles, etc. then dcpromo to demote the original DC, then P2V it so that I end up with 2 VM's in this domain instead of just one would probably be the cleanest and easiest way to get this to work but I'm curious as to why the P2V online/hot cloning didn't work? Again, in my scenario running this old WSS 2.0 is critical and it won't be changed until 6+ months down the road, so I need to virtualize this environment to protect myself from old hardware failing.
I know there are mixed feelings in the community about not doing this and reasons why and others that have done it successfully, but since it has been done I'm curious why it didn't work for me...or at least not yet...because if it did then I would end up with just one VM DC in that domain and it's one less VM to worry about yet I achieve the same end result.
Any and all input is greatly appreciated, thanks.