Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Additional Resources

Microsoft has produced an outstanding guide for customers setting up a branch office deployment. A branch office deployment is a deployment with a large number of WAN sites that need to be connected. One example of a branch office deployment is a large retail outlet that has a central office and hundreds of retail outlets that are all tied together into the same forest. If you have to deploy this kind of infrastructure, you absolutely need to review the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Branch Office Guide; you can find it on the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9353A4F6-A8A8-40BB-9FA7-3A95C9540112.

Bridgehead load balancing is an area that Microsoft greatly improved in Windows Server 2003. Although Windows Server 2003 will better distribute the replication load across multiple domain controllers, the new load-balancing algorithm will only work with new connections that are established so when you add a new domain controller, it will be underutilized for replication connections. Windows 2000, on the other hand, will not spread the load at all, which can create a topology that results in overloaded bridgehead servers in hub sites. Microsoft produced a tool to help with both of these issues. The tool is called the Active Directory Load Balancer (ADLB) and will look at the connection objects for a specified site and evenly spread those connections across all of the DCs in the site that can be used as bridgeheads. ...