© 2004 Mustan Bharmal. All Rights Reserved.
1.Introduction to the Forest Plan
It is necessary for every organisation, planning the execution of design activities to generate aWindows Server 2003 Active Directory infrastructure, to execute at least one Forest Plan. Thisis regardless of any preconceptions on the number of forests and domains required.It is necessary to create one “Forest Plan” for each required “production” forest within aWindows Server 2003 Active Directory infrastructure for an organisation. A “production” forestis a forest that directly supports one or more business processes within the organisation, andhence the organisation will depend upon the existence of that forest. Note that this designmethodology does not recommend the creation of a Forest Plan for “non-production” forests,such as parallel test forests within the organisation, which only
indirectly
support businessprocesses within the organisation, such as change control infrastructures, and so on.Note that it is only possible to execute the processes within each forest plan followingcompletion of the “Organisation-wide Active Directory Plan” design process to “determine theboundaries and content of each required forest”.
1.1.
Background Information
This design methodology defines a forest as a virtual entity, with a distinct logical boundarythat represents one or more Active Directory domains, each of which share a commonSchema, Configuration, Global Catalog, and an Active Directory replication topology.A Forest Plan caters for the design of those components of an Active Directory infrastructuredefined, created, deployed, or managed only at the forest level, except the replicationtopology, which the “Site Plan” covers.Note that references to “this forest” or “this Active Directory forest” within this Forest Planimplicitly refer only to the Active Directory forest that this Forest Plan supports.
1.2.
Forest Plan Processes
The forest plan is composed of the following processes:
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Determination of the number of domains required within the forest. Where it is possible toidentify the requirement for the design and deployment of multiple domains, then there willbe the requirement to:
♦
Design the structure and relationships of the multiple domains within the forest
♦
Determine the boundaries and content of each required domain within the forest. Note,if only one domain is required, then the boundary and content of this domain will bedetermined by the “Organisation-wide Active Directory Plan” design process to“determine the boundaries and contents of each forest”.
•
Design of short-cut trust-relationships between domains within the forest
•
Determination of the size of the Active Directory database for the forest
•
Design of the forest root domain for the forest
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Design of application directory partitions for the forest
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Design of directory quotas for the forest
•
Selection and raising of the functional level of the forest
1.3.
Deliverables of Forest Plan Processes
The forest plan processes will have the following deliverables:Page 3 of 122 Last printed 28/5/2004 12:03 a5/p5
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