Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Administrator's Companion

Other Active Directory Components

Active Directory is a complex system that includes far more than the basic logical structure just described. This section highlights several other components that play a critical role within Active Directory.

Naming Partitions

You can think of Active Directory as being divided into three distinct directories, or partitions: the domain partition, the configuration partition, and the schema partition. Each partition is a self-contained section of Active Directory that can have its own properties, such as replication configuration and permissions structure. A Windows Server 2003 domain controller always holds three naming partitions in its database file (Ntds.dit). These are the default LDAP paths for these partitions: ...