Multiple Sites Administration

[Randy Whitehead]

I am trying to figure out the best way to setup multiple sites so that
administration becomes manageable. Right now I have about 20 locations
all running as workgroups (sizes varying from 1 to 30 pc's) and each
user is signed in as an Administrator on their PC. Each site has some
form of internet access (varying from ISDN to T1), so any management
right now is done through PcAnywhere. Also, each pc has a standalone
antivirus (either norton or mcafee). As you can tell, its almost
impossible to keep up with the administration at this point. I am
relatively new at dealing with this large of a scale, could someone
point me in the correct direction for beginning to untangle this?

I am currently working on connecting all of the sites together, and
exploring the use of VPN's. I am just not sure as of yet how the
performance will be. If all the sites are connected, I am trying to
figure out if each one should be a seperate domain or subdomains. Also,
I am looking into a corporate antivirus solution as well.

Thanks for any help.

Randy

 

[Mike Silverman]

I would ask myself these questions first before linking everything
together...

- What is the business benefit of doing this?
- Will this affect the user communities and how?
- Is this mostly for IT related cost savings on administration? And if
so, how much are you actually saving?
- Will this allow centralization of other services than IT?

Bandwidth estimation will depend largely on what kind of traffic will
flow over the VPN tunnels. If each site already has a server and you
want to have one forest, you're best bet is the mutli domain
configuration. Each geographic site will be a 'site' in AD and you can
control replication traffic fairly well that way.

Corporate antivirus will also integrate well into that environment but
depending on the product you choose will determine how it needs to be
set up (ie master site versus child sites, etc...)

We're in a similar boat but not really looking at hooking up all our
remote sites yet...

Mike.

 

[Phillip Windell]

We have over 20 sites as well and they are all connected by VPN.

Each site is it's own independent Domain with no relationship in any way to
the other sites. We run the Corp Edition of Symantec AV and it is done
independently at each site. Each site has typically one trained IT
administrator.

Our HQ which is the "logical" center of the wheel is the only site that the
other sites connect to and that is done mostly with Terminal Services and
Citrix and this is the most bandwidth effiecient way. The other "child"
sites do not contact each other directly as a standard practice, but there
may be a few minor exceptions.

Because we keep our site "autonomous", if our HQ suddenly rolled over and
died, the remaining sites would still be about 90% functional because we
keep the dependency of HQ for daily operation to a minimum.