Nested OUs in Active Directory

I could find no maximum published by Microsoft. That doesn't mean there isn't a maximum, as much as it is an assumption by Microsoft that no one would be crazy enough to try and discover the limits.

Therefore any maximum is more of a practical one beyond which effective management and administration is impractical. What that maximum might be is really dependant on your overall organization design. It also depends on whether you are using OUs for the delegation of administrative control orfor the application of GPOs. You might be able to get away with 6 or 7 levels if you are delegating administration, while anything over three levels may prove to be problematic if attempting to apply GPOs. It really depends on the complexity of your requirements.

At every level, the person with administrative control must be capable of managing all the child containers beneath him.

Also remember that when applying Group Policy, although Account Policies can be defined at any level, they are only applied at the local computer and domain levels. Therefore, if you have organizations that reuire variations in account policies, you need to creat a new child domain rather than another nested OU.

Sorry I couldn't help more.

At a MS Technet Briefing a MS consultant told us not to create more than 4 OU levels. This because at client logon each OU is checked for clent and computer membership. If you create too many OU levels client logon will take too long and will cause problems.

Hope this helps, good luck.