I am part of a team that supports infrastructure (including servers and network) for a business that has about 2000 employees spread over 15 locations. We have two larger offices (approx 300 - 400 users each) that currently have local VMware clusters. These hosts a handful of VMs - including Windows servers for DHCP and AD domain controllers (including DNS).
We are coming up on renewal time for VMware and of course, the support cost has gone way up. Management is asking if we can get rid of the local servers and move all of the current services to Azure or elsewhere.
DHCP currently runs on a local Windows VM. We would likely move DHCP to a Cisco switch.
We could reconfigure our DHCP scopes to send clients to existing AD and DNS servers in Azure. This works - all of our smaller offices are currently set up this way.
Is there any reason that we need to keep any of these services local? The "best practice" advocated by MS seems to be keep a domain controller / Global Catalog local to each site.
Have any of you completely moved away from having any local servers/services? Any reasons to avoid doing this?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts and experience.