Best redundancy strategy

[Arnaud Lesauvage]

Hi all !

I administer a small local area network. I am not very familiar
with Active Directory, but I can get around most problems.
Currently, we have ~15 workstations and one Win2000 Server.
Our server is using running Active Directory, and it is also our
file server.
It runs both the DNS and DHCP services on our network.

I am looking for the best way to make my system redundant.
We are ready to buy a second server (equivalent to the first one).
I know that I can configure this server as a secondary domain
controller, and that this would be enough to let the users log on
to the domain and have their policies applied, even though the
first server would fail.

For the file server, we used mapped drives to unc paths that look
like \\servername\sharename.
Of course, this path would not work anymore if the server fails.
What is the solution ? I heard about DFS, but I don't know if this
is what I am looking for ? If it is, is it easy to setup ?

About DNS and DHCP : I could configure a secondary DNS server (I
know DNS well enough to do that) on the backup server. But what
about DHCP ? How can I have two DHCP servers on my network, and
have the first server being the only one serving addresses ?

Last, but not least : the 'ultimate' solution, IMHO, would be
something like a virtual server, with only one IP address, but
made of two identical server in something like a clustered
environment. IS this kind of thing possible with Win2000 and AD ?


Thanks a lot for reading this, and eventually for giving me advices !

Regards

 

[Guest]

Yes, you could use DFS w/ FRS replication for redundancy if one of the file
servers was to go down. Instead of mapping to \\server\share you would be
mapping to \\domain.com\dfs\share. This would allow for either server to
respond to the request in the event one went down.

Have a look through Microsoft's FAQ on DFS:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/dfsfaq.mspx