When removing a hard disk from a VMWare ESX virtual machine running Windows, is it best practice to shut down the server first or is there a minimal risk (if the drive is not being written to at the time of removal; drive being non-OS drive) by keeping the server online. I have previously kept servers online with no damage when moving a hard disk from one VM to another but that got me thinking about best practices.
I attempted to install Windows Server 2012 on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 and found out that the server may not support Server 2012. Is there any downside to running a Windows Server 2012 domain controller from a virtual machine on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server? I know this is possible but I am looking at best practices. I also want to note that this is an additional domain controller as I already have another Windows Server 2012 domain controller on a physical machine (non-virtualized)
I'm looking to start a service where I collect Windows events from consumer computers over an SSL link (https) but I want to make sure that extremely sensitive information wouldn't be contained in the data (especially if a hacker got a hold of the information)