followup question:
what happens when running AD and the server fails? can the rest of my computers logon and do anything? how hard is it to downgrade to p2p and run off an AC backup on my workstation as a main computer again on the fly?

or is easily restorable backup server the way to go?

separately, it seems replication of essentials 2012 r2 to a backup hyper-v box will be free, true? if so, is this not what everyone should be doing? you'd have a restorable picture of your vm server 15, 30, 1hr and 1 day ago all ready to fire up at a moments notice, all aside from off-site backup copies.

thanks for all replies

larry

Larry
Solo IM
Midwest