Active Directory, Second Edition

Application Partitions

Application partitions are a new feature in Windows Server 2003. They enable administrators to create areas in Active Directory to store data on DCs they choose rather than on every DC in a domain or forest. You can define which domain controllers hold a copy of the partition, known as a replica. There is no limitation based on domain or site membership, which means you can configure any domain controller in a forest to hold any application partition replica. The existing site topology will be used to automatically create the necessary connection objects to replicate among the servers that hold replicas of an application partition. Domain controllers will also register the necessary SRV records (explained in more detail in Chapter 6), so that clients can use the DC locator process to find the optimal domain controller for an application partition, just as they would for a domain.

There are a few limitations to be aware of with application partitions:

• Application partitions cannot contain security principals, which most notably includes user, group, and computer objects. Any other type of object can be created in an application partition.

• None of the objects contained in an application partition are replicated to the global catalog. Even if a domain controller that holds a replica of an application partition is also a global catalog server, the domain controller will not return any objects from the application partition during a global catalog search.

• Objects in ...