i am researching for a project we will be doing this year, and part of it involves moving from a workgroup to a domain. we currently have two locations, each with about 25 users. we have a site to site VPN between the two locations. i am not a IT professional, but i am the closest thing my company has and may get some proper training depending on the direction this project goes. my goal is to eliminate any down time that is more than a few hours.
because we have to locations, i would like to setup the system so that each site acts as a fail over for the other. i assume i need a DC in each location, with one of them being primary. do i need a second DC in the primary location, or will the one in the second location suffice? if i need a backup DC in the primary location, does it need to be on a different physical server or would just another VM be better?