Planning and Implementing the Active Directory Infrastructure

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Certification Objectives.
Plan a Strategy for Placing Global Catalog Servers
Plan for Flexible Placement of Operation Master Roles
Implement the AD Forest and Domain Structure
Implement the AD Site Topology
Plan a Strategy for Delegating Administrative Tasks
Two-Minute Drill
Q&A Self Test

Before any Active Directory rollout can take place, you must take the time to go through the planning stages and carefully evaluate every minor detail of the project. The price you might have to pay for planning mistakes is often quite high in later stages of the Active Directory life cycle. Windows Server 2003 delivers a few enhancements that make it possible to change things as fundamental as renaming the root domain—something that was very difficult to achieve in Active Directory on Windows 2000 Server. Nonetheless, lack of planning may result in higher maintenance costs (for instance, higher than necessary volumes of replication traffic over the WAN), administrative headaches, and in the worst case scenario, reinstallation of Active Directory from scratch. Planning is far too important a process to be neglected, no matter how small or large your deployment.
Active Directory consists of several forms of resource organization, such as domains, trees, and forests. AD infrastructure servers also play different roles, for example, a domain controller could also participate as a Global Catalog server, PDC Emulator, RID Master, Schema Master, and in some other capacities. Each of these components and organization mechanisms is discussed throughout this chapter. Understanding these concepts is crucial not only for the purposes of exam 70-294 but also for your success as an Active Directory administrator.

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