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A simple ADS design question, please.

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by skooboy 1 view

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For a year now, I've been preparing to implement ADS in my school district. I'm ready to make a decision and take the plunge, but I'd sure like to get some feedback on my plan. The Plan: I have 4 sites. Sites 2,3 & 4 connect to site 1 (a "hub") with full DS1 T1's. Each site has a single, powerful W2k server to act as DC (I currently only run workgroups and run DCHP & NAT off my Cisco routers). There's not much traffic in my WAN, just internal email and port 80 traffic. There are no political considerations either, as no one even knows what ADS is or even that I'm doing it. Here's my question: should I create seperate domain trees, or create a single tree with site 1 (district office) being the parent and 2,3&4 the children? My ISP handles outside www DNS, and I will forward www traffic to them. Also, can I continue to run DHCP off the routers, or must I create & run DHCP off of the W2k servers? PS:The W2k servers currently function as print & email servers, too, but with minimal usage (I'm looking into buying print servers to remove that burden). Thank you.

3 replies

by tazz_nl

In this scenario I would create one AD domain/tree.
This makes administration a lot easier then with a multiple domain config. You can create sites for each location to tune replication traffic. Place at least 1 DC at each location and assign multiple GC and DNS servers to distibute load and create redundancy.
Of course you can use your Cisco routers for DHCP but if you run DHCP on your W2k server you can also use DDNS. This means thatyour DHCP server registers DNS records in DNS Dynamicly. This makes name resolution a lot easier.

Good luck.

by timwalsh

The primary purpose for having multiple domains is to allow decentralized administration.

The beauty of AD is that at some later point in time, if you decide that your domain has grown too large to manage centrally, you can always create child domains and move computers and users between domains relatively easily.

Given your present requirements, there is no need for multiple domains.

by mainard1

I would create 1 active directory in one of the sites, and make this server also the print server (choose the beefier server of them all) the DHCP let it run through the routers if you already have that configured since they will be diffrnt subnet each anyways. I would probably bring in the DNS in the active directory server too. I would use the servers in the schools as file servers and get a new email server and make this also a DC as a back up to your ADS. place these servers where you are for easy access.

hope this helps

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