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Restructuring and Reorganizing an entire domain, starting with the DC.

Hello Everyone,

Throwing a bone out to you, hopefully receive some good news and answers!

I've recently joined the company, and am shocked at what I have found so far, 6 servers, which include a DC, Exchange, File, SQL, and 2 Terminal Servers. I've been spending some time looking at them all, and basically there are a number or areas I am keen to address.

The first one for starters is the DC. Its a Xeon 2.8, 512MB Ram, 18GB SCSI, with 2x 9GB partitions.
Now i'm by know means new to this area, however I am new to the corporate/0 time for administration ever environment. What worries me about this server currently is the following.

a) Ram
b) HDD
c) sysvol located in default location on the c:\ drive, running out of space, around 1gb.
d) DNS, DHCP, WINS, AD, Application server are the roles.

Now, what I want to do is 1 of 2 things. Either transfer all roles to a secondary domain controller, decommision this one, rebuild, dcpromo and transfer all roles back, or move the sysvol/dns/dhcp/wins databases to the d:\ drive, which currently is empty.

Any suggestions/recommendations would be great, as I have a long road ahead of me, and many late nights I think!

SOLUTION

Chris Dent

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ASKER

Thanks for the promot reply Chris, generally speaking, i'm not alone in thinking these things should be stored on a seperate partition for performance and scalability issues?

In terms of my original idea, rebuilding, its a while since i've had to do it, so please reaffrmr my steps.

dcpromo another server, be it a spare etc
transfer all roles (any links?) to newly promoted server. (will this take across all dns, wins, dhcp?)
demote old dc, remove from domain
rebuild, bring back up, do the oppoiste of above.

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Chris Dent

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ASKER

Couldnt agree more with 2 DC's, the secondary is currently an SQL server. I'm hoping to achieve all of this with a Saturday to minimize impact. I think its possible, what do you reckon?

When I mention storing the sysvol on another drive, I do mean another partition, not physical disk, if that makes much difference? I suppose my rational is should the DC fail spectacularly then i'd still have AD etc on the d:\ drive, restore from backup, and bam back online, however not having had it happen, I doubt its as simple!

I'm sure this hole process sounds more complicated than i've actually made it, I just want to cover every eventuality. The alternative of course is to just tidy it up, and leave the sysvol where it is?

SOLUTION

Chris Dent

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ASKER

I guess thats just it really, I mean yes i'm experienced, as an MCSE in 2003 you'd hope so! It's just this kind of thing, unless you regularly do it, you tend to loose focus on the steps!

Chris Dent

Absolutely :)

I'm sure you'll be fine, naturally if anything isn't clear don't hesitate to ask.

Chris

prospecthospice

ASKER

next step is moving the mailstore on the exchange, also on the c:\ drive, when the d:\ is completely unused 120gb free! thats for another day though!

thanks for your help!

Chris Dent

lol cool.

That one is pretty easy, the GUI will allow you to shift both the logs and databases. As long as you're patient with it for large databases ;)

Last one I did was 120Gb, took over an hour to move from one SAN disk to another, all that time with the "Moving" thing looking like it was stuck.

Chris