This white paper focuses on best practices for implementing an enterprise Active Directory infrastructure using virtualization technology. We will discuss how to perform a full migration of your physical AD infrastructure to a virtualized environment. Many of the topics are also relevant if you plan to support a mixed environment.

There are different methods for this type of implementation; however, it is important to understand certain behaviors. As in any virtualized environment, results may vary. Factors that affect the outcome include network speed, hardware performance, system redundancy and virtual machine (VM) density policies (that is, the number and type of virtual machines per server).