Question regarding failover/logon problems when domain controller goes down.
We have a domain controller setup which also holds our roaming profiles and home directories.... DNS/DHCP... we also have an Exchange server which is a domain controller as well, also running DNS and both machines are Global Catalogs.
My question is, basically we are trying to build a more fault tolerant system and have some sort of backup should one machine go down where people can still work. At the moment if the "primary" domain controller goes down the network seems to slow down and people have a lot of problems logging on and having unresponsive systems.
As far as I'm aware they should still be able to be authenticated by the exchange server should the domain controller go down, all clients have secondary DNS set as the exchange server so this should still be ok also. The only problem is that they will not have access to their profile directory or their home directory, would this be the sole reason why machines appear so unreponsive? Or is it to do with the other server roles as these can only be applied to one server?
Was just wondering as our domain controller has gone down a couple of times recently out of hours when it is difficult to resolve the issue and thinking of ways we can minimise downtime for the people we have who have to work out of normal hours (we have a 24 hour department)
My question is, basically we are trying to build a more fault tolerant system and have some sort of backup should one machine go down where people can still work. At the moment if the "primary" domain controller goes down the network seems to slow down and people have a lot of problems logging on and having unresponsive systems.
As far as I'm aware they should still be able to be authenticated by the exchange server should the domain controller go down, all clients have secondary DNS set as the exchange server so this should still be ok also. The only problem is that they will not have access to their profile directory or their home directory, would this be the sole reason why machines appear so unreponsive? Or is it to do with the other server roles as these can only be applied to one server?
Was just wondering as our domain controller has gone down a couple of times recently out of hours when it is difficult to resolve the issue and thinking of ways we can minimise downtime for the people we have who have to work out of normal hours (we have a 24 hour department)
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ah see, redundant DC's do do that sort of....GC's will allow you to keep logging on, but without manually seizing the crucial roles, you performance will simply deteriorate...I understand where you are coming from and the additional DC idea does work, just could be a little bit stronger:) and there is nothing wrong with a good rant!
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Why haven't Microsoft built a system where by if you have 2 domain controllers you can have them both sharing the roles somehow to provide some sort of backup... I know that I have done similar things with linux systems.... it's annoying because if our domain controller goes down for some reason and we have another authenticating server our clients should still work, apart from roaming profiles (which are cached on the local machine) there is nothing else that we require access to on the domain controller