Active Directory Cookbook, 4th Edition

Chapter 13. DNS and DHCP

Introduction

Active Directory is tightly coupled with the Domain Name System (DNS) name resolution service. Windows clients and domain controllers alike use DNS to locate domain controllers that are housed in a particular site or that serve a particular function (such as a global catalog server). Each domain controller registers numerous resource records (RRs) in DNS to advertise its services as a domain controller, global catalog server, PDC Emulator, and so on.

One of the innovative uses of Active Directory is as a store for DNS data. Instead of using the primary and secondary zone transfer method, or even the more recent NOTIFY method (RFC 1996) to replicate zone data between non-AD integrated DNS servers, AD integrated zones store the zone data in Active Directory and use the same replication process used to replicate other data between domain controllers. The one catch with AD integrated zones is that the DNS server must also be a domain controller, and overloading DNS server responsibilities on your domain controllers may not be something you want to do if you plan to support a large volume of DNS requests. You can integrate forward lookup zones, reverse lookup zones, and stub zones into Active Directory. Stub zones are used to maintain information about remote DNS zones and to reduce zone transfer traffic across WAN links. Additionally, you can use a GlobalNamesZone (GNZ), a manually maintained zone that is used to provide short name resolution on a ...