The company I work for has some rather remote offices and we are in the process of virtualizing some of our infrastructure components, particularly our remote domain controllers. I have done a remote DC deployment in one of our other foreign offices and the replication of the Domain took quite a while. In that case, I didn’t realize I would be rebuilding a domain controller in virtual until after I showed up at the office. This time though I know what I am going into. So… the goal? Build the DC here as a Hyper-V VM, export it to an encrypted drive, take it with me, and re-import the VM to the new Hyper-V server I will be putting in on the other side. I realize I will need to make some DNS updates as the AD server’s IP will be changing but, based on what I have read, I think this should go pretty smoothly! Wish me luck!
I think a brief followup should be made on this. Moving a DC as a virtual and redeploying it a few weeks later (after it has been off for a few weeks) didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. I ended up rebuilding the DC from scratch anyhow. The issue may have been complicated by existing network issues that were breaking replication though.