The architecture we have adopted calls for one DC at each WAN-isolated location. Even the sites that have several thousand user accounts only have one DC. The DCs are reasonably beefy quad-proc servers. There are roughly forty WAN locations. And if real-life performance calls for changes, we'll do that when the time comes. Right now, we're only beginning to migrate large numbers of user accounts into the W2K3 AD domain.
We have one empty root domain, and one child production domain. All our DCs are GCs.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of joe
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 8:34 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] how many domain controllers ?
For production, never less than two. The max depends on your usage and your WAN configuration and network stability.
If you have heavy usage due to apps like Exchange, you *may* need a couple of more. I think the calculation is one GC CPU per 2 Exchange CPUs or something like that? Though I am never a huge fan of just paper guessing, it may work for 80% of the places and you have one that doesn't fit that model. They don't know what else you are doing.
If you have a WAN configuration with network connectivity that can drop (i.e. isn't guaranteed 100%) and you care about whether they work in a dropped state then you will need at least one per isolated location.
If you have a single domain, make all DCs GCs.
joe
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Mike Maple
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 6:28 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ActiveDir] how many domain controllers ?
Does anyone have a view about how many servers in a domain should be domain controllers. Should it be all of them - or only a few on each site ?
Mike.
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