DNS Best Practice Reccomendation

[Karndt]

So this is my first post on the communities so first off hello!

I am messing around with my test environment last night and I had a question that I was wracking my brain on this morning wether or not this should be done. I have forward lookup zones created for all of the ESXi servers in the environment setup on the DNS on the domain controller. My question is, is when DNS goes down say I shut the DC down for some reason should I add the IP addresses and name resolution in the hosts files on the Windows Server running vCenter? Should I also modify the /etc/hosts file on the ESXi servers to include the vcenter and the other ESXi server?

I have it setup and running with all the host files modified currently but I was wondering for a small environment like that if that would be the best practice or not.

Thanks!

[idle-jam]

DNS is only needed when you are enabling VMware HA. if you have host IP in vcenter it will recognise IP instead of host. anyway the  better practice for your small environment is to add host file in vcenter, and the esx. atleast things looks goood.

[JohnADCO]

Hmmmm....  Best Practice?

Is to have another DNS server ether a physical machine or a VM in another, separate Vsphere cluster no?  Or maybe one on each ESX host on local storage?   You can never have to many DNS servers. 

We really had issues with DNS until we went this route.      Problem is if you have to have your cluster down, say for storage maint.  You end up with no DNS server.  Which sucks to be blunt.

To many things rely on it in my exeriences to ever be without one up and running.

[bulletprooffool]

Hi - and welcome to the community.

In general, hosts files are not really needed - provided your DNS is sound.

one thing to watch out for though is if you have an AD DNS and have set this to only allow secure updates from AD clients, you could find that the DNS records for your ESX hosts are not getting created / updated.

Also, of course, you want to configure the addresses of the DNS servers from the vSphere client - in addition, you want to configure the DNS suffix at the console screen so your ESX knows what zone to register itself on.

Remove an ESX host from your DNS and reboot it, makes sure that it is in fact updating all of its records (the ESX does not need to be in the VC for this to work)

Good luck and please feed back with your results.