I work for a school corporation and we are going through a bit of an upgrade here. Here is our current configuration:
We have multiple (about 18) Windows 2003 AD forests with the DCs being located at over 10 locations. Obviously this makes management pretty difficult since group policy changes need to be made multiple times, etc. Our long term plan is to get everything on one parent domain with child domains for each school. We would also like to take the DCs out of the schools and host them at the data center. A server would still be at the school to handle DHCP and other small services.
My plan is to purchase a high-end server to be used to virtualize 3 of the schools' DCs running Windows 2012. I may add a fourth virtualized DC to the physical server to function as the parent DC or this may go in as a physical server. The other schools would be added as servers are replaced. Is this even possible and if so it is the best way to do things? I've heard conflicting stories about running AD on virtualized servers. Also, is there a way to import the user and computer accounts from the 2003 DC to the 2012 one? We are planning on totally changing our structure going from school.schoolcorp.k12.state.us to school.schoolcorp.local so I'm guessing it would be a fresh install of AD instead of an upgrade.
Thanks for your help. We haven't had any major upgrades in years so I'm a little behind.