Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of GordonPrince
GordonPrinceFlag for United States of America

asked on

how hard is it to add a second or third DC to my network

I'm an application developer consultant and have worked at a few dozen different organizations over the past few years. Everyone I've worked with has multiple domain controllers on the network. My understanding has been that this enables users to log on if ANY ONE of the domain controllers is available. So this increases the network's availability and can share the work -- all good things.

Now I'm working with an organization with only one domain controller (Windows 2003). They have four Windows servers (two are 2000, two are 2003) in two locations. The locations are connected together via T1. There are been occasions when the T1 goes down and people in one of the locations can't log on since the DC is on the other side of the T1.

So I've suggested making one or two of the non DC servers into a second DC. The networking people say this would take 6-8 hours of labor and it's not worth it. But what I read about the process is that it's pretty automated and that although it requires a couple of reboots on the new DC server, it's not that labor intensive.

What you you guys say -- are we getting snowed by the network technical people? Or is running dcpromo to add a DC to the network something that is easy and doesn't take much labor?
SOLUTION
Avatar of hpgriffind
hpgriffind

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Alan Huseyin Kayahan
Alan Huseyin Kayahan
Flag of Sweden image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
As you can see, not hard.  Further, you should know that it is Standard Operating Procedure to have at DCs at each site.
Not only for fault-tolerance, but it speeds up logins and AD-related lookups.  The procedure MrHusy detailed re: Global Catalogs will insure that.

As an AD architect, I can't stress hard enough how fundamentally important this is.

If you take this advice, give points to the guys above - I'm just agreeing with them.
I missed a note - please consider having at least one additional DC at your primary site for fault-tolerance.