AD consolidation help

[Guest]

Scenario:
I have a customer with a Windows 2000 AD forest, with a parent domain and 5
child domains, in five cities, ranging from 20 users to a maximum of 200
users (over all the company has about 600 users). The sites each have two
Exchange 2000 servers.

It has been decided that there is no need for all the child domains and the
exchange servers. All the domains will be consolidated into a single one. And
there will just be one Clustered Exchange server at the head office.

Solution:

- Create one AD 2003 Parent Domain.
- Using ADMTv2 move computers and user objects to the new domain
- Consolidate mail into one single clustered Exchange server
- Keep two domain controllers in each site for authentication purposes.

Question:

Is this a good plan?
Do you see any problems with this?
Are there better ways of approaching this?
What are the "gotchas" that I should watch for?

Your help is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Kevin D. Goodknecht Sr. [MVP]]

In

Scenario:
I have a customer with a Windows 2000 AD forest, with a parent domain
and 5 child domains, in five cities, ranging from 20 users to a
maximum of 200 users (over all the company has about 600 users). The
sites each have two Exchange 2000 servers.

It has been decided that there is no need for all the child domains
and the exchange servers. All the domains will be consolidated into a
single one. And there will just be one Clustered Exchange server at
the head office.

Solution:

- Create one AD 2003 Parent Domain.
- Using ADMTv2 move computers and user objects to the new domain
- Consolidate mail into one single clustered Exchange server
- Keep two domain controllers in each site for authentication
purposes.

Question:

Is this a good plan?
Do you see any problems with this?
Are there better ways of approaching this?
What are the "gotchas" that I should watch for?

I think it might be easier to upgrade your current Forest Root domain to
Win2k3 then use ADMT to migrate the accounts from the child domains into the
current forest root.
You end up with the same results by migrating one child at a time and have a
better chance of keeping everyone up, while keeping current trusts in place.