Windows Server® 2008 Bible

Chapter 19. Organizing a Logical Domain Structure

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Planning the logical domain structure

• Partitioning the domain

• Using organizational units to create domain structure

• Creating the design blueprint

If you've read Chapter 18, you are probably pretty psyched about Active Directory, and you probably thought that we were nuts in the opening chapters of this book, where we urged you not to install Active Directory and to deploy standalone servers until you are at home with the new operating system. In this chapter, we are going to go overboard. We are going to tell you not to build your new domain until you have read this chapter, done a psychoanalysis of your company, and designed your domain on a whiteboard or a math pad and come up with a blueprint.

While Windows Server 2008 provides a way for you to rename your current domains by using the Active Directory domain-rename tools, we still believe that documenting your domain structure before creating the physical structure is very important.

Before you start, know that if you delete from the server either the root domain or the last domain on a domain tree (a process known as demotion), then you uninstall the namespace. If you screw up the namespace and decide, after many hours of hard work, that you started wrong, you could end up losing all those hours that you spent creating user and computer accounts and configuring domain controllers. In addition, if you go into production, you also take down several colleagues. We thus ...