Active Directory, Second Edition

Domain Namespace Design

The first stage in your design is to work out the domain, domain-tree, and forest configuration of your network. The best way to do this is to make a first pass at designing the domains and then structure them together into a series of trees. Before we start, however, let’s take a look at our objectives for this part of the design.

Objectives

There are two objectives for the design of the domain namespace:

• Designing Active Directory to represent the structure of your business

• Minimizing the number of domains by making much more use of the more flexible Organizational Units

Represent the structure of your business

You need to make Active Directory look as much like your business structure, geographical or organizational, as possible. With geographical structure, your business runs itself as self-contained units within each geographical site. In this model, people at those sites handle administration for each site. Under the organizational or political model, the business is based on a series of departments that have members from a number of different geographical sites. Normally, with this structure, the organization has a head office for all departments at one location, but that is not always the case.

In the former model, finance units based in France and Australia would be separate finance departments. In the latter model, France and Australia would have geographical finance branches of a larger finance department controlled from a head office.

It doesn’t matter ...