Supporting AD Environment

[Guest]

I am looking for guidelines on the resommended number of engineers required
to support Windows 2000 Active Directory Services.

We are looking to setup a dedicated support team, and I was wondering how
many engineers we should be looking to employ.

The AD environment will consist of just under 40,000 user accounts, 2/3
domains, and around 50 Domain Controllers.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Regards
FNB

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

The answer to this is a huge fat "It depends.".

What is the scope of the work? What is the SLA? Do you need 24x7 coverage? What
do you have for provisioning tools? How much delegation to local non-domain
admin type people do you plan on doing?

I previously came in and took over support in a Fortune 5 company that had 250k
users and 400 DCs spread across the world. The previous group had some 30+
domain admins across the forest. I reduced that to 3 admins across the forest.
The same three were ent admins and domain admins in every domain.

I have seen even smaller deployments with 100+ domain admins.

My recommendation is to have the number of DA's be as small as possible and not
exceed 10 people all under the same direct manager. Anything else becomes a
nightmare for change control management and control of the directory.

joe

 

[Cary Shultz [A.D. MVP]]

Howdy Fat Northern Biffa!

I would guess that you get away with three or four really good Admins ( plus
several Junior Admins ) for the Servers and you would probably need
something like one Help Desk person for every 75 users. This is what I have
heard. But that might not work as that would be 500+ Help Desk people.

Anyway, let's look at the Admins. Be very careful with the Schema Admins
and Enterprise Admins and Domain Admins groups. Only your top people should
be in these three groups. And you might really want to consider using the
Delegation Wizard for delegating 'menial' tasks to the Junior Admins ( no
disrespect intended to them! ).

But, you might want to wait for someone who handles this size as I am
usually in the 35 to 300+ user environment. Clearly things are a bit
different when you are talking about 40,000 users.

HTH,

Cary