Active Directory Administration Cookbook

Dimensioning the servers properly

Now, let's look at how to actually dimension intended domain controllers:

• Intend to create equal domain controllers in terms of hardware dimensions: It's tempting to place one big server and one smaller server as domain controllers, but consider the possibility of having to move FSMO roles or other loads from one domain controller to another. Since domain controllers are randomly assigned to networking clients inside an Active Directory site, networking clients accessing the smaller server might not enjoy the same performance.
• Dimension the intended domain controllers properly in terms of hardware: Domain controllers offer the best performance, when they can cache the Active Directory database, ntds.dit ...