Setting Up Sites in Windows 2003

[Brian]

I am new to the AD world and would appreciate any
suggestions you may offer.

I am going to be creating sites for each of our 6
locations(Dallas, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville,
Houston, and California). Within each site I will add
each office in that town. For example. I will create a
Houston site and add each of the 3 office's in Houston
into the Houston site. Each of the 3 office's in Houston
is on a different subnet. Will I create the 3 subnets
and then associate them with the Houston Site. I
understand I will need to create site links between each
site. If the corporate office is in Dallas would I need
to create a site link between the Dallas Site and each
other site. Will I need to associate a certain Site link
cost with each link? What about a Site Bridge Link?
What about a Bridgehead server? What about a Intersite
Topology Generator?

 

[Cary Shultz [MVP]]

-----Original Message-----
I am new to the AD world and would appreciate any
suggestions you may offer.

I am going to be creating sites for each of our 6
locations(Dallas, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville,
Houston, and California). Within each site I will add
each office in that town. For example. I will create a
Houston site and add each of the 3 office's in Houston
into the Houston site. Each of the 3 office's in Houston
is on a different subnet. Will I create the 3 subnets
and then associate them with the Houston Site. I
understand I will need to create site links between each
site. If the corporate office is in Dallas would I need
to create a site link between the Dallas Site and each
other site. Will I need to associate a certain Site link
cost with each link? What about a Site Bridge Link?
What about a Bridgehead server? What about a Intersite
Topology Generator?


.
Brian,

Here are oa few things that I might consider:

1) Set up the six Sites - as you plan to do
2) create the appropriate Subnets and associate each with
the appropriate Site
3) create an Organizational Unit for each City
4) create a sub-OU for each of the offices in each city
5) place at least one DC in each Site
6) do not forget about the placement of the Global
Catalog Server(s)

So, you might have something like this:

-Active Directory Sites and Services-

Sites - Dallas
Houston
Virginia Beach
Atlanta
Jacksonville
California

Subnets - 192.168.1.x ( Dallas )
192.168.2.x ( Dallas )
192.168.10.x ( Houston )
192.168.11.x ( Houston )
192.168.12.x ( Houston )
192.168.20.x ( Virginia Beach )
192.168.30.x ( Atlanta )
192.168.31.x ( Atlanta )
192.168.40.x ( Jacksonville )
192.168.41.x ( Jacksonville )
192.168.50.x ( California )

-Active Directory Users and Computers-

Dallas ( OU )
10th Street ( sub-OU )
Cowboys Avenue ( sub-OU )
Houston ( OU )
Main Street ( sub-OU )
Astros Blvd. ( sub-OU )
Elm Avenue ( sub-OU )

You get the picture. Obviously, you would place all of
the user accounts / computer accounts in the appropriate
OU/sub-OU.

However, what exactly are your plans for this? There are
a lot of things that can be done. How are the different
offices in the same city ( for example, the three in
Houston ) going to be connected? We have a client that
has four locations: the main office in Roanoke, VA and
three "branch offices" in Blacksburg, VA , Richmond, VA
and Raleigh, NC. The users in the "branch offices"
connect via TS. There is simply a Firewall-to-Firewall
VPN in place between the main office and the three branch
offices. All of the user accounts are on the DCs at the
Main Office. I have an OU set up each office and the
user accounts are located in the appropriate OU. This
works because there are about six people in each of the
branch offices.

I might also take this opportunity to suggest that you
install the Support Tools on each of your WIN2000
Servers. The Support Tools are located in two places: on
the WIN2000 Server CD in the Support \ Tools folder and
on the WIN2000 Service Pack CD in the Support \ Tools
folder. There are a lot of nice utilitites that will
really help you.

HTH,

Cary