AD and Remote Office Design Question

[pagy]

Hi all,

We have a remote office which will have a 2 meg link back to HO and I'm pondering over whether to put a DC at the remote site.

There are only 20 users down there but I think they will require file services which should probably be local.
The link will also be used for web traffic/downloading and email.

The speed of only 2 meg worries me with logon traffic, web and email going though it, it could only take some fool to send a large email attachment to grind things to a halt.

DFS will also be used to replicate local data to HO for backups.

Any thoughts on this please?

Paul
VCP4

https://www.mcpvirtualbusinesscard.com/VBCServer/PaulP/profile

RFC 2795 - The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2795.html

Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week

 

[58sniper]

The speed of "only" 2MB is somewhat interesting. I had 200+ people using a 2MB line for Internet/mail/downloading.

For myself, I wouldn't put a DC in a branch office with only 20 users. Perhaps if they were using very large files, like CAD files, I might put a file server running DFS in the office. Anything less and I would have a hard time justifying the expense of hardware, OS, related software, and time to put something in a branch.

My current client puts a RODC in an office @ 50 users, and a standard DC at ~75.

That's just my .02.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[pagy]

Thanks Pat. Okay 'only' is probably me just being slightly spoilt nowadays as I have 100 meg to the internet at work and 50 at home so 2 meg to me is so 2005

Part of the issue I have is I have been given no business requirements yet but been told to do the technical design anyway which is somewhat the wrong way around!!

My initial thoughts were for a file server with DFS in the branch office.

Have you ever done any form of testing on a WAN link to ensure it's suitability? I've been asked to 'test' the link but aside from having some test machines down there and logging them in around 09:00 everyday and seeing how long the logon process takes I'm a little unsure/unclear what else could be tested.

Paul
VCP4

https://www.mcpvirtualbusinesscard.com/VBCServer/PaulP/profile

RFC 2795 - The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2795.html

Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week