DC Question

[Gavin]

I want to throw this out to the group as I need to get some clarification on
what we want to do. We have 2 Dc's at our main Data Center and are looking
to consolodate some of the offices that have DC's, one in particular has
about 250 users and 1 DC with a 10MB ethernet circuit to the Data Center...
my question is does anyone see any issues with removing the DC that is at
this site and then having them authenticate to the DC at the Data Center.
What I want to avoid is any slowness as the users a used to having the DC
local... any thoughts or comments?

Thanks
Gavin...

 

[Herb Martin]

I want to throw this out to the group as I need to get some clarification
on what we want to do. We have 2 Dc's at our main Data Center and are
looking to consolodate some of the offices that have DC's, one in
particular has about 250 users and 1 DC with a 10MB ethernet circuit to the
Data Center... my question is does anyone see any issues with removing the
DC that is at this site and then having them authenticate to the DC at the
Data Center.

Generally if it looks like a separate WAN it should be a separate SITE
and then have it's own DC(s).

10 Mbps is certainly fast enough but the real question is how is the current
load on that line, and the latency?

What I want to avoid is any slowness as the users a used to having the DC
local... any thoughts or comments?

Whether it will be noticably slower is only something you will likely
know through testing, but it will likely be a LITTLE slower (measurably???)

Also consider you reason...are you going to actually "save a server" or
still need local server that could just as easily be a DC? What about DNS?
Does this same server also provide them DNS resolution as their PREFERRED
DNS server?

And you do have this as a separate SITE? Correct?

IF not you aren't even benefiting from the local server some of the time.

BTW, this is not as easy to test as one might naively guess by just taking
the local server off line temporarily (all that sites and services stuff and
the fact that clients remember their old site etc will cause the tests to
be complicated to run "cleanly".)

 

[Brian Desmond [MVP]]

Gavin-

Without know your environment I can't really give you a valid assesment. My
gut feeling is that 10meg is way more than enough to not have a DC, though.

Things you need to look at - is that 10mb link saturated at any times? What
are the business costs if users can't authenticate when it goes down (cached
logins will help solve this)? Does your WAN team have an SLA on that link if
it goes down?

--
Thanks,
Brian Desmond
Windows Server MVP - Directory Services

www.briandesmond.com