Book Image

Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Design and Implementation: Creating, Migrating, and Merging Networks

By : John Savill
Book Image

Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Design and Implementation: Creating, Migrating, and Merging Networks

By: John Savill

Overview of this book

A well thought-out Active Directory provides a solid foundation for other services which will lower support costs and allow companies to centrally manage their environment. You should look at the Active Directory as your first step in moving to a centrally managed, highly integrated IT environment that supports efficient and effective delivery of business capabilities. Once the appropriate technical infrastructure is in place, it is vital to leverage that infrastructure to create an enterprise-class application infrastructure. If you are creating a new Active Directory network, or are migrating or merging existing installations, this is the book for you. While the basics of the Active Directory are straightforward, to get the most from it requires careful planning and a thorough understanding of what can be accomplished. For any environment there are a number of core stages in the Active Directory implementation; the 3 Ds: discovery, design, and deployment. In this unique book, we take a broad range of environment types and work through these stages; suggesting an Active Directory design specific to that environment, and how to implement it; at each stage providing clear instructions so the decisions are clearly understood and the best-practice principles will be maintained throughout your system lifetime. There are many books on using, administering, or even deploying Active Directory, but this is the only book that exists to relate the crucial design aspects to your target environment, and show you to implement this design. This book covers discovery, design and deployment stages of Active Directory implementation in the following scenarios: A small, single location company with fairly basic needs and a basic Windows NT 4.0 domain A larger company with multiple regional areas which are currently facilitated by multiple NT 4.0 domains A retail-type business with very different drivers and requirements from that of a standard business, based on Windows 2000 Active Directory Merging and restructuring the Active Directory infrastructure of two financial institutions
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Upgrade


Let's get this out of the way first: many people ask "Can I bring a 2003 DC into a 2000 domain?" meaning "Can DCPROMO be run on a 2003 server and the server be promoted to a domain controller in a domain currently only serviced by Windows 2000 domain controllers?"

Yes, this is one way of upgrading, but we have to run the forest preparation and domain preparation stages first, which we will cover in a few pages.

Practice Makes Perfect

What we outline here is the process of upgrading a domain from Windows 2000 to 2003 but, because this involves modification of the schema, it is highly advisable to perform this upgrade in a lab environment first.

To do this, perform the following high-level functions:

  1. 1. Install a new Windows 2000 Server machine (it could be a virtual machine like VMWare or Virtual PC).

  2. 2. Promote it to a domain controller in the existing live domain as per normal procedures for adding additional domain controllers.

  3. 3. Make sure it has DNS installed and a replica of the...