Designing Your Windows 2000 Active Directory - Part 2

Designing Your Active Directory

Several key elements are important to consider when designing the Active Directory:

• Business model. Consider your organization's key business objectives while designing the Active Directory namespace.
• Administrative model. Consider the importance of administrative responsibility at all levels of the domain hierarchy in your enterprise network.
• Future growth and reorganization. Design the Active Directory namespace to accommodate organizational changes.
• Security. Set policies and enable trusts that provide users with secure, authorized access to network data and resources.
• The existing environment. Determine a strategy for upgrading or migrating from the existing environment to the Windows 2000 environment. This includes planning for integrating distributed applications with Active Directory.

Once you have evaluated these business issues, you should consider some characteristics that are important to the Active Directory design:

• Flexibility. As the company changes, the proposed architecture must be flexible enough to be able to accommodate those changes without any visible change to the overall service provision.
• Scalability. As the company grows or changes its business model, the proposed architecture must be able to scale at a global level and have a design that can handle rapid growth by servicing hundreds of millions of objects.
• Decentralization. The proposed architecture should be designed so that no one entity can wield absolute control over the entire namespace.
• Maintainability. The proposed architecture should be user-friendly and modular so that various parts can be replaced or changed independently of others.
• Globalization. Directory design must accommodate the size of a growing organization, keeping in mind global expansion, or dispersion. Consider the global network topology and global administration and support needs. Identify whether there is a common set of services and/or management across regions and business units.

Preparing the Windows NT Server 4.0 Environment

It is not necessary to wait. You can begin preparing your current Windows NT Server 4.0 environment for migration. The following tasks can be performed now to get your Windows NT Server 4.0 environment ready for migration:

• Perform a network discovery and document all computers; their purposes; operating system versions, including Service Packs; and application loads.
• Upgrade to Windows NT Server 4.0 any servers that are running previous versions, since Windows NT Server 4.0 provides the easiest upgrade path to Windows 2000.
• Consolidate all resources into as few domains as possible.
• Implement an enterprise-wide DNS structure. Choose one of the naming conventions supported by the Active Directory that best fits the needs of the organization.
• Simplify the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) architecture as much as possible. As you migrate to Windows 2000, you will still need to rely on WINS for NetBIOS resolution until you have eliminated NetBIOS altogether. In your plans for eliminating NetBIOS, be sure to check all applications for dependencies on NetBIOS.
• Become familiar with Windows Scripting Host to develop system administration tools and Microsoft Management Console (MMC) as a repository for those tools.
• Become familiar with Microsoft DFS, which provides the capability to create distributed file systems that spread across several servers. With DFS, the user does not need to know the names of the servers on which the information is stored.soft Management Console (MMC) as a repository for those tools.

Start testing now by establishing a proof-of-concept lab for product evaluation. Establishing this lab environment prior to deployment will help prevent engineers and users from "playing" with the new operating system on your production network. This will also provide an environment for application testing during your migration project.

Read the Microsoft Windows 2000 white papers and walk-throughs available on Microsoft's Web site. Microsoft has done its best job yet in providing technical white papers and migration strategies prior to the product release. Take the time to read about subjects such as site boundaries, directory replication, global catalog servers, and indexing. Implementing new features like these without completely understanding their purpose and without fine-tuning can cause less than optimal network performance.

Next: Designing Your Windows 2000 Active Directory - Part 3