Many factors have to be taken into consideration.
1- Are you planning to have a dedicated AD site for Exchange, in other words are this GCs going to be dedicated for Exchange?
2- Are you planning to allocate sufficient memory to hold the the DIT in memory?
3- Distribution group expansion, does you company realy on using large distribution lists? (DG expansion affects GC performance)
4- Are you looking at implementing Dual Core servers?
These are the things that might affect the number of GCs you implement.....
Mauricio Funes
From: Al Mulnick
Sent: Wed 2/1/2006 10:06 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] x64 domain controller sizing?
Really? I didn't get that from the documentatioin the same you mention. I always took it that you wanted to put it on the same network to avoid network issues where possible, related to WAN connectivity or latency. Basically, Exchange is so dependent on a GC that you want to provide the best possible situation for it to be able to communicate with as few opportunities as possible for something to go wrong. Fewer moving parts as it were.
Best bet is to follow the other post from Joe which mentions coming up with your own benchmarks. That takes a lot of the ambiguity out of the equation.
Be sure to put plenty of memory in the new machines. ;)
On 2/1/06, Ion Gott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I believe the number of GC's would really still be dependent on your site topology, number of objects published to the GC, number of child domains in the forest etc.. and location of Exchange servers in relation to users. Also if clients are using applications that are directly dependent on the GC, like online Outlook GAL lookups.The Active Directory Sizer tool Microsoft released early during the Windows 2000 release really is pretty much useless as it references pretty old hardware such as 700Mhz Pentium II Xeon processors and there really isn't much else available on the MS site as far as specifics. They usually just say things like have a GC located close to clients that use GC dependent processes such as the GAL and having redundant GC's in sites that contain Exchange servers.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Jeremy Olson
Sent: Tue 1/31/2006 4:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ActiveDir] x64 domain controller sizing?
Is there any recommondations for the number of x64 GC to exchange 2003 servers? We are about to start deploying 2003 domain controllers. I would rather use fewer x64 servers. The dit file is about 4.6 gigs.
Thanks
Jeremy
