When do you need to create a site?

[bbowers]

We are a school district with 28 schools connected via 100 MB Metro E. The District Office has a 1Gig link back to the cloud. Each schould would have a Domain Controller with the primary at the District Office. Each school has its own subnet. Would it be necessary to setup sites in this situation? Most of what I read says site creation is for slow WAN connections.

 

[unclerico]

no, you don't HAVE to create a new site for each physical site. Sites are there merely to contain replication traffic as well as to determine proximity to resources. If you don't mind huge amounts of replication traffic going across your link as well as the possibility of someone in site 1 authenticating to a DC in site 28 then don't create a site. All in all creating and maintaining sites and services is extremely simple so even though you might have a huge amount of bandwidth I would still go with best practice and create the needed sites.

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[theravager]

Pretty much a site should always have a DC in it, unless you are using it for some sort of logon scripting etc. If you want people to authenticate against a particular dc most of the time then you need to have a site with the subnets of clients that you wish to authenticate against in that site.

Pretty much with the exception of extremely tiny domains a proper site and subnet structure should be used as it fairly quick and effortless to setup. If you install any other microsoft systems such as sms, exchange etc sites and subnets are also used.