AD planning

[Chris]

We're planning the migration from NT4 to W2K/W2K3 AD and I
need some guidance.

We have 8 domains (NT4) and 1 W2K AD domain. We have 1800
users in about 200 locations (worldwide). Of these 200
locations we have 4 major locations (3 in the US / 1 in
the UK) and then sales offices with 20-40 people each.
Every office is connected via VPN tunnels to the core
network.

I want to consolidate things as much as possible. "IT"
will be controlled out of one single location. Would it be
better to work with 1 or 2 domains and many sites in this
situation or rather build a tree (single forest) and have
many domains? We have support technicians in several key
locations. For delegating powers - is it better to assign
them to OUs or to domains?

Chris

 

[Andy Cadley]

Ideally Active Directory should be set up with just one domain and then the
load distributed by creating Sites and sticking DCs at appropriate locations
to avoid unnessecary WAN traffic.

Avoid other Domains unless there are good reasons to do so.

AndyC

 

[Chriss3]

There can be a reason to create a domain as a replication boundary, its may
not necessary to replicate all objects within a domain to all sites, then
you may want to create a separate child domain for replication propose. This
depends of how many objects you have and where they should be replicated. In
many case you not need the objects in NA to be replicated over the wan link
to EU and create two child domains, na.domain.local and eu.domain.local.