First off, you may want to look into what you can do with
that SAP app in the future, your hands are bound in a bad way and at some point
you will find yourself between a rock and hard place for something due to it. If
you guys wrote the SAP app, work on making it more flexible, if someone else
wrote it, it should be configurable unless they wrote it specifically for you
which would be unusual I think.
Everything presented here would indicate a single forest
with multiple domains is fine. Multiple forests with a single domain each would
also be fine. From an exchange viewpoint, I had multi-domain forests, things can
get messy.
For the first option, you would have the option of a parent
child relationship or two trees. In almost all cases I recommend parent child
relationships (or root, child, child, child, x) because multiple tree
deployments tend to confuse the heck out of most admins and support people and
there is already an issue with not a lot of people really understanding what is
going on in AD. Most companies DO NOT test their apps in a multi-tree
environement and I have seen apps that make assumptions on the naming and tree
structures that assume non-disjoint naming and single trees. Also many documents
that are written go that way as well and many scripts.
For instance if you have two trees in your
forest
domain1.com
and
domain2.com
And you read a document that says well if your domain is
domain2.com then your config container is probably
cn=configuration,dc=domain,dc=com instead of saying go to the rootdse and query
for the configuration partition. This is slowly getting better but I still do
tend to see mistakes like that. Your people supporting the environment would
have to be on top of that.
From what I see here, I would probably do a two domain
single tree single forest deployment. It is the simplest from several aspects.
You would have your domain.com which is your main domain and then spin up the
sap domain as a child so you get domain.com and sap.domain.com.
joe
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of knighTslayer
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 5:40 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ActiveDir] 2 NT4.0 domains to a Forrest
Hi,
I'm planning to upgrade my NT4.0 domains to Windows
2000. I have NT domains that have two-way trusts to each other.
The first domain is where all my users, printers, file
server and mail servers are and the second domain is just for my SAP
applications run. My SAP servers are completely dependent on the SAP
domain to start the services and it is hard coded which accounts from that
domain can start them, therefore I must maintain the domain logon, SID and
account name. The SAP domain requires the use of printers and file servers
from the user domain.
I am making a migration plan where I intend to upgrade my
users domain to Windows 2000 Active Directory first and maintain a two-way
non-transitive trust to the SAP domain. I will switch to native mode and
then I will upgrade the SAP domain to Active Directory.
However, I am not sure whether to create a new domain tree
or create a child domain of the users domain for the SAP domain.
What would be best? Or would creating a new Forrest
and have trust be any better?
Thanks
Adam