© 2004 Mustan Bharmal. All Rights Reserved.
1.Introduction to Site Plan
This design methodology requires the design of a single Site Plan for each requiredforest within a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory infrastructure for anorganisation.
1.1.
Site Plan Objective
The objective of the generation of a Site Plan is to assist an organisation in thegeneration of a design of only those components of an Active Directory infrastructurethat require analysis and design at the Site level. The execution of the processeswithin this Site Plan will generate a design for a Site infrastructure to support thedistributed replication requirements of a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory forest.
1.2.
Site Plan Scope
The logical and physical boundaries of the Active Directory forest (see theOrganisation Wide Plan process “determination of the boundaries and content of each required forest”) this Site infrastructure will support will define the scope of thisSite Plan.
1.3.
Background Information
The function of this process is to design a Site infrastructure that supports adistributed replication topology for the Active Directory database of a forest.Active Directory provides a foundation for distributed replication of the database for the forest, and supports granular configuration and control of the routing andscheduling of replication traffic between domain controllers.The design of a Site infrastructure is hence essential to the implementation andcontinued operation of a distributed Active Directory infrastructure for an organisation.It is important to note that in addition to the control of forest-wide replication betweendomain controllers, the designed components of the Site Plan will exert an influenceupon authentication, and other operations that rely upon the Active Directory, such asSite-aware services like Distributed File System (DFS).The production of a Site Plan for a forest is critical to the normal operation of anActive Directory forest infrastructure. Note that a Site Plan is required for an ActiveDirectory forest where the components of an organisation represented within theforest are currently logically and / or physically distributed, or require logicaldistribution via a Site Plan.It is possible for a Site Plan to generate a logically distributed replication topology for an Active Directory forest since Sites do not necessarily map to physical locations,although the terms can become interchangeable and the distinctions between the twovague.The Active Directory represents each Site within a forest as an object. It is possible todefine a Site object as “one or more linked high-speed networks that are logicallygrouped via complete subnets within the TCP/IP architecture that supports the forest.”Based upon this definition, it is hence important to understand the concept that it ispossible to segregate (for example) four subnets within a single LAN into four ActiveDirectory Sites within one office / physical location.The objectives of this process are to assist an organisation in the identification of such requirements to allow an organisation to develop a Site infrastructure that willmeet their specific business and technical requirements.Page 3 of 176Last printed 28/05/2004 12:21 a5/p5
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