I am providing support for a company that has 6 sites across town. I want to implement a Active Directory Domain across the sites so people can move from site to site without problems and it will make managing the 400 employees much easier. All of the locations are connected via a fiber 3.0Mbps Vlan, but are on seperate subnets: 172.27.x.x, 172.28.x.x, 172.29.x.x, etc.
My questions are:
1) does there need to be a DC at each location?
2) Should I setup sub-domains for each location like: location.maindomain.com, or should I just have one domain without the subnets?
3)If I do have a DC at each location, can those DC also serve as a BDC for the other 5 locations, or would I have to have a Main DC and a Backup DC at each location?
I’m thinking that I could just have a linux box or the router do DHCP at the other locations, and just point DNS to the main and backup DCs on another subnet. I just don’t know how much of a problem it will be.
I am also considering using roaming profiles. I have some questions about that as well.
1) what will roam with the profile? (printers, documents, outlook pst’s, etc)
2) If I can just use one main DC and one backup DC, will this cause huge network latency issues?
I really appreciate any input that you may have. I’m kinda getting in a little over my head, but I’m sure I can do it, if I can get some good feedback from you all.
Thanks again for your help!