http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2010/01/14/be-sure-to-plan-carefully-when-virtualizing-your-infrastructure.aspxThere is a lot of excitement around Microsoft virtualization technologies these days and rightfully so.&#160; One of the ‘hottest’ areas right now appears to be making virtual machines highly available using Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clusters soen-USTelligent Evolution Platform Developer Build (Build: 5.6.50428.7875)http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2010/01/14/be-sure-to-plan-carefully-when-virtualizing-your-infrastructure.aspx#3307955Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:56:26 GMTd5e57398-b9ef-4490-9955-07cbb4e4a80d:3307955Pronichkin<p>Hi Chuck,</p> <p>I personally believe that WORKGROUP is not a really necessary consideration here. All you need to do is to have at least one stand-alone (i.e. not clustered) hyper-v host. It CAN be a domain member.</p> <p>A stand-alone host is perfectly able to start by itself without any networking and authentication infrastructure available. It is able to start its VMs. And since at least one of these VMs is a DNS server &amp; DC (possibly you'd also need a DHCP server in case your Hyper-V servers rely on it), all the other hosts can successfully bring their clusters online and launch all the remaining VMs.</p> <p>Regards,</p> <p>Artem Pronichkin, VM MVP</p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://blogs.technet.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=3307955" width="1" height="1">