Here is my scenario/setup and I'm close to ready to put this as my production environment, but want to make sure that I have no pitfalls here.
I have no physical equipment on-site. Everything is cloud based. I have an Azure Virtual Network and Azure Active Directory. I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM in Azure with AD/DNS installed and promoted to DC. I have installed some other software on it such as my accounting system. I had an issue where an Azure OS maintenance was done and my VM wouldn't start up immediately. I was able to get it back up. So I started to investigate the Availability Set feature.
I did a capture of VM1 and used that image to create VM2 and set them both in the same Availability Set. In Azure, I see that VM2 list listed as my update & fault VM.
Question 1: Is that the correct process? With Active Directory, I know that you are not supposed to take a snapshot in a VM environment. Is doing a capture the same as taking a snapshot? or is it AD aware? I want to make sure that I will not face a USN rollback error or anything that can cripple my environment.
Question 2: How do I keep the 2 servers in sync? I know that I can use software to keep the accounting database in sync, but how do I keep AD in sync?
Thanks in advance.