WD Lesson-4

Planning the Active Directory Infrastructure

Design

Q. What do you mean by Active Directory Infrastructure Design?

Q. Discuss the major stages involved in it?

Active Directory Infrastructure Design

• An Active Directory infrastructure design is a plan you create that represents your organization’s network infrastructure.
• There are two major aspects of Active Directory design:
1. Design Tools
2. Design process

i. Design Tools

To develop an effective Active Directory infrastructure design, you must have the following tools:

a) Design Team: Our design team must consist of a multilevel panel of the following professionals:

(i)                  Infrastructure designers

(ii)                Staff representatives

(iii)               Management representatives

b)      Business and Technical analysis

This analysis report must consist of the business model of the organisation as well as the type of technology being used inside.

c)      Testing Environment

We need a simulation of our production environment that allows you to test parts of your network deployment, such as our Active Directory infrastructure design, without any risk.

ii. Design process

The Active Directory infrastructure design process consists of the following four stages:

1. Creating a forest plan

2. Creating a domain plan

3. Creating an OU plan

4. Creating a site topology plan

 1.Creating a forest plan

Using more than one forest requires administrators to maintain multiple schemas, configuration containers, global catalogs, and trusts.So we should go for one forest except the following needs.

■ Separate Network administration

■ Separate political Business units

■ Isolated Business units maintenance

■ Isolated schema or global catalog.

■ limited trust relationship between domains of domains

2.Creating a Domain Plan

• The first step we must consider using multiple domains in the following cases for adopting a multiple domain plan are:

■ security policy

■ privacy concerns

■ replication traffic

■ NT domains retention

• The second step in creating a domain plan is to define the forest root domain.
• The third step in creating a domain plan is to define a domain hierarchy and name domains.

 3.Creating an OU Plan

·        To create an OU plan you must define an OU structure. There are three reasons for defining an OU:

■ To delegate administration

■ To hide objects

■ To administer Group Policy

·        The primary reason for defining an OU is to delegate administration.

 4.Creating a Site Topology Plan

There are four major phases in creating a site topology plan. These are as given below:

The first step is to define sites. The second step is to place domain controllers. The third step is to define a replication strategy. The final step is to place global catalog servers and operations masters within a forest.