Configuration of 2016 AD for failover

Question

Hello-
We have 2 Windows Server 2016 servers/DCs as follows:

Server1: Physical 2016 server running AD, DHCP, and DNS.
Server 2: VM 2016 server running AD, DHCP, and DNS.

We are attempting to create a failover environment without using a failover cluster. We have setup DHCP failover from Server1 to Server2 in hot standby mode. DNS is out-of-the-box AD-integrated.

Question: is it a Microsoft best practice to hand out the IP address of server2 as a secondary DNS server in the DHCP scope options? Were server1 to fail, would this model allow for automatic failover?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely. the DHCP server can hand out two (or more) DNS servers to answer requests in the event one happens to be patching / rebooting, etc.

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Answer 2

My colleague swears this is an absolute misconfiguration and against MS best practices. Can someone point me to some MS docs on this one?

Answer 3

I'm sure there are many others but one from a quick search. Configure the primary and secondary DNS client settings to point to local primary and secondary DNS servers (if local DNS servers are available) that host the DNS zone for the computer's Active Directory domain.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/best-practices-for-dns-client-settings#windows-2000-server-and-windows-server-2003-member-servers

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Answer 4

He's not buying it :) Any more modern docs?

Answer 5

He's not buying it

Well, not much we can do about that, it has not changed. I'd suggest looking around here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/

or another option is to start a case here with product support.
https://support.serviceshub.microsoft.com/supportforbusiness

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