Hello,
I currently have 2 physical 2003 domain controllers in my AD environment. One of the servers has the Schema and Domain Naming role while the other has the PDC, RID, and Infrastructure role. Both servers are DNS and WINS servers and one of them is a DHCP server. They are running on some old hardware and I have a Barracuda spam firewall that does LDAP lookups and the DC that relies on has been crashing lately so when that happens my email is not being delivered until i bring that system back online.
My goal is that I would like to build 2 brand new 2012 virtual machines on VMware and make these my 2 new domain controllers and decommission both of the 2003 boxes. I also would like to add a third "physical" 2012 domain to the mix. I don't know if this is possible but i would like some type of redundancy in other words so if one of these new 3 DC's fails I would like to avoid the issue above with the LDAP lookups for instance.
What is the best way to accomplish this task, also one other concern i have is that not all of my pc's on the network are assigned DHCP address, some of them are static IP's with DNS entries hardcoded to point at both of my 2003 DC's. I also have a bunch of printers that are static assigned IP addresses and same thing with DNS, it is setup to point at the 2003 boxes. Since the new 2012 domain controllers are obviously going to have different IP's then my 2003 boxes is there a "trick" or any easy way to get around my DNS issue without having to visit every device that is static assigned and physically change the DNS entries?
Any suggestions or guides are greatly appreciated
Thanks!
Frank