Domain membership is recommended for servers running Hyper-V

Applies to: Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016

For more information about best practices and scans, see Best Practices Analyzer.

In the following sections, italics indicates UI text that appears in the Best Practices Analyzer tool for this issue.

Issue

This server is a member of a workgroup.

There is no central management for this server.

Joining this computer to the domain allows centralized management through policies for identity, security, and auditing.

If you have a domain environment available, join this server to that domain.

Important

We recommend that you review the workloads running in the virtual machines on this computer to determine whether there are security implications of joining this computer to a domain. If any of the virtual machines are virtualized domain controllers, see Planning Considerations for Virtualized Domain Controllers (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=190192).

Joining a computer to a domain requires permissions on the computer and the domain:

On the computer, you'll need a user account that's a member of the Administrators group. Either log on with this type of account, or provide the user name and password for the account when you're prompted.
On the domain, you'll need a user account that's authorized to join the computer to the domain. You'll be prompted for the user name and password.