Thoughts about quantity of DC(s)? 1

[cajuntank]

I am about to roll out some 64bit 2008 Domain Controllers and want some opinions on maybe cutting back on my current thinking of DC count. Geographically, I have 6 locations within the county limits and currently have 100Mb MetroE connectivity for my WAN. I had originally thought about putting 1 DC per site for my four smaller sites (50-150 users/site), and 2 DC(s) per site for my two larger sites (150-400 users/site). I am using HP Proliant DL360 G5's with plenty of RAM and processor, so I'm thinking the single machine could handle it and having the 100Mb WAN connections, that I'd be ok should that local DC be down at those larger sites.

Thoughts/opinions?

 

[theravager]

Only factor in this case is the uptime on your wan lines, if its really good you could just have the one DC total. Note you will want a 2nd one to have a backup and its probably worthwhile putting that in another site if its cloud connected WAN.

Note you probibly want to have a larger C partition then normal as well as x64 uses significantly more space then you will probibly expect.

 

[58sniper]

cajuntank - Those would be my recommendations, too. 1 in each site, two in your "main" site where email servers and other things are running. Although, for 150-400 users, you likely won't see a significant advantage using 64bit. But why not, right?

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/

 

[cajuntank]

Thanks guys... these links are quite stable so far (only been in place for two months). My thought process is, in another two to three years to migrate those links to 1GbE circuits and possibly have little to no servers at all at my remote sites and make our district office the data center for all processes.

 

[58sniper]

That's fine until you suffer an outage of a link, router, or switch. Then your branch is completely offline.

Using a RODC, along with DFS, you could have servers in the branch offices that you don't have to worry about backing up.

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/

 

[acl03]

I agree with Pat. If you have a branch office with no local Domain Controller, and the line goes down (or any single point of failure along the way), your users will not even be able to access their local network drives.

They'd be logging in using cached credentials since they cannot see the domain, which does not provide logon scripts or access to network drives.

We have 9 district offices and a main site. We have 2 DC's in the main site, one in each district. We have only 1 domain, so every dc is also a GC.

One of our 2 DCs in the main site is a virtual server, and I have a script that shuts it down nightly, backs it up to tape, and turns it back on.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!