The Design Process

By Author: Willsimith
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After you've assembled your design team, gathered business and network analyses, and established a test environment, you're ready to begin planning your infrastructure design. The Active Directory infrastructure design process consists of the following four stages:
During each stage, you consult your business and technical analysis documents and assess your organization's requirements. You also assess any changes planned to address growth and scalability issues.
Stage One—Creating a Forest Plan
In this stage you also create a schema modification policy, a plan that outlines who has control of the schema and how modifications that affect the entire forest are administered. Adhering to the schema modification policy, certification provider you assess an organization's schema needs and determine whether to modify the schema. If it is necessary to modify the schema, you design a schema modification plan.
Stage Two—Creating a Domain Plan
After analyzing your organization's requirements, the first step in creating a domain plan is to determine the number ...
... of domains required. Because adding domains to the forest increases management and hardware costs, you should minimize the number of domains. Once you've created a domain, the domain cannot be easily moved or renamed. However, you might need to consider using multiple domains in the following situations:
The second step in creating a domain plan is to define the forest root domain. 70-290 Exam You can choose an existing domain for the forest root or designate a new domain to serve as a dedicated forest root domain. Using a dedicated forest root domain provides advantages in security administration, replication traffic, and scalability. Define your forest root domain with caution, because once you've named the forest root domain you cannot change it without renaming and reworking the entire Active Directory tree.
The third step in creating a domain plan is to define a domain hierarchy and name domains. To define the domain hierarchy, you must perform the following actions:
Finally, you determine the placement of DNS servers. MCSE Exam You also plan additional zones, determine the existing DNS services employed on DNS servers, and determine the zone replication method to use. The end result of a domain plan is a domain hierarchy diagram that includes domain names and planned zones.
Stage Four—Creating a Site Topology Plan
After analyzing your organization's requirements, the first step in creating a site topology plan is to define sites. The main purpose of a site is to physically group computers to optimize network traffic. In Active Directory, site structure mirrors the location of user communities. You must define a site for each of the following:
The second step in creating a site topology plan is to place domain controllers. Because the availability of Active Directory depends on the availability of domain controllers, a
Lesson 3 Planning the Active Directory Infrastructure Design 1-41
domain controller must always be available so users can be authenticated. For optimum network response time and application availability, you must place at least