RE: [ActiveDir] Interesting paper on Microsoft's Internal IT Active Directory design.

[Charles Oppermann]

Title: RE: [ActiveDir] Interesting paper on Microsoft's Internal IT Active Directory design.

I can speak from personal experience that the implementation of Active Directory at Microsoft was largely complete long before the code was released.

You think you have schema replication issues - image having to update the DCs with different schemas and keep Exchange 5.5 working for those 50,000 users.

The change from NT4 domains to Active Directory went very smoothly at Microsoft, as compared to moving from MS-Mail to Exchange 4.0, which was a nightmare.

Charles Oppermann
Author, Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory Programming
http://www.coppersoftware.com/

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Neil Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent:   Thursday, March 08, 2001 4:37 PM
To:     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject:        [ActiveDir] Interesting paper on Microsoft's Internal IT Active Directory design.

Are Interesting paper on Microsoft's Internal IT Active Directory design.
you putting off that upgrade to Windows 2000 because you dread
having to design an Active Directory structure to be migrated to from
your far-flung NT 4 domain structure?

Suppose you had an IT organization of 2,500 people worldwide,
including full-time employees, contractors and interns, responsible
for managing roughly 50,000 users, 100,000 desktops, and thousands of
servers that span 450 sites in 62 countries. Suppose your internal
network's physical topology was comprised of:

* More than 200 WAN circuits.
* Over 1,000 routers.
* More than 140 ATM switches.
* Over 900 LAN switches (100M bit/sec to servers, 10M bit/sec to
  desktops).
* In excess of 2,500 IP Subnets.
* More than 100,000 LAN ports.

If so, then you'd be Microsoft's Information Technology Group (ITG),
and you'd have a monumental project on your hands. Fortunately (for
you) ITG thoroughly documented their planning and deployment as they
migrated from NT 4 domains to Windows 2000's Active Directory. And
now they've made that documentation available to you.

"Windows 2000: Designing and Deploying Active Directory Service for
the Microsoft Internal Corpnet"
(<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/showcase/w2kacdir.asp>) is a
fascinating paper outlining the choices and decisions needed to plan
a successful rollout of Active Directory in an NT 4 domain
environment. If you're moving from a different operating system
(NetWare, Unix, etc.) to Win 2000 this won't be as valuable, but for
NT 4 networks looking to migrate this makes excellent "how to"
reading

List info: http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm
List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/