RE: [ActiveDir] Site link costs

[David Adner]

Title: Site link costs

Cathy,   If you're a Premier customer ask your TAM (or some other friendly MS employee) for a tool called ADMap (aka: The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer).  This is a tool written by someone in Microsoft that will query your AD configuration and draw it in Visio (preferably version 2002 or higher).  Although it's available to customers it's not available for download, hence the request to a MS employee.  With a diagram you'll be able to see on paper just how your topology is laid out.  This often helps cut through all the arguments and debates on how people think things are configured vs how it's really configured.   If all you have is a single Site Link with all Sites added to it then you have a full mesh topology.  The KCC will then create connection objects in a relatively willy-nilly pattern, although in reality it's working as expected based on the topology you (the admin) defined.  If, instead, you were hoping for a hub and spoke (or multi-hub and spoke or hybrid) topology, then creating individual Site Links between each remote site and a hub site that only include those two Sites will cause the KCC to create connection objects in a more predictable manner.   There is also the question on if you want to leave the 'bridge all site links' option enabled or not (it's enabled by default).  This option treats all Site Links as transitive, which can provide a level of redundancy some customers want.  If you cannot, however, state that every DC can communicate with every other DC (or you're a very large, complex environment), then turning off the option is recommended.       -----Original Message----- From: O'Brien, Cathy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 1:06 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: [ActiveDir] Site link costs Sorry for the basic question... Our company just upgraded our NT4 domains in-place as child W2K3 domains under an empty W2K3 forest root domain. 22 sites and their associated subnets were established, with one subsidiary leaving all their objects in the default first site because they feel their bandwidth will support it. However, we're currently having heated discussions regarding AD and site topology. Some IT members are saying that there is no need to manually create site links or assign properties such as cost and replication interval. They say that if we don't do this, then AD does it automatically and it will do a better job than we would anyway. I  thought that the KCC needed the site topology info to be provided (whether manually or programmatically) so that it could automatically create the connection objects (provided you're not manually creating them). So who is confused here, me or them? This should be basic stuff, and I want to understand it correctly :-). TIA, Cathy