I have recently taken up a fairly senior non techy role within an expanding company. I have some basic technical experience from a while back and I?m hoping you experts out there can offer some help (our current IT team is thin on the ground).
My new company has two offices (geographically disperse) with two separate networks with a similar composition.
The two offices are linked by an IPSec tunnel I believe.
The main office (Office A) is the main office and hosts 3 servers (Windows 2003 Standard file server with Exchange installed but not functioning, primary and secondary domain controllers). There is a Sonicwall firewall at this location and around 80 desktops, printers etc.
The secondary office (Office B) has a backup domain controller and an additional 3 servers (File Server/domain controller which runs Small Business Server 2003 Standard, Web Server, Sql server). There is a Vigor firewall and the site connects to the internet through a Cisco managed router. There are about 75 desktops, printers etc.
The proposed solution from management is to create a single domain across two sites using the IPSec tunnel as a means of communication between the two offices. A trust relationship would be setup between the two domain servers at the two sites allowing us to keep both main office servers in synchronisation. All AD information would then be kept synchronised between the two locations. All users would be given a unique logon and would login to 1 overall domain.
The main file server in Office A is very high spec and we were hoping to set up AD and Exchange for the entire company (about 200 users) on this server (Can this then be replicated out to other domain controllers? Wasn?t sure about this.
The SBS 2003 server which is currently running Exchange for all email would need to be upgraded to Windows Server 2003 I believe as SBS can?t form trusts. Is that correct? How easy would it be to transfer Exchange to the higher spec server in Office A? I presume the MX records would have to be changed? How long does this process take? Would a weekend be sufficient for this turnaround? Would it be wise to have a secondary Exchange Server?
I presumed the existing DC in Office B would still act as a domain controller in Office B handing out IP addresses within the Office B network? Is this the best solution? If it is would it still need to be synchronised with the DC in Office A?
All desktops have XP.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully I?ve attempted to explain our problem as well as I can? Hopefully some of you guys have had experience of implementing a similar setup and can offer some advice.
Thanks for taking the time.