[ActiveDir] W2k3 DNS Scalability

[Eric_Jones]

Potentially interesting oddity occurred today...

Our primary and secondary Windows 2003 / AD integrated DNS server services abended at almost the exact same time.  I have custom WMI monitoring set to auto-restart them, send email, call the president, and of course...raise the national threat level.  

The servers are dedicated AD boxes, so no rogue software or odd config.  The servers are Dell PowerEdge 2560s with 4 GB RAM, 3.06GHz processors and lots diskspace on a RAID 1 / RAID 5 config.

The reason that I suspect performance / scalability is that when I check the utilization trend reports and each server was averaging 82 queries/sec. But surely, the servers can handle more.  Heck the over all CPU utilization is about 3%.  We have most of the Windows platform using these two DNS servers, but still have more to go.  Eventually the load will be distributed among soon to have future AD DCs.  But I was very surprised to see the processes crash.  All other trended perfmon metrics were well within reason.

Any thoughts?  Anyone perform specific DNS customizations to their respective dedicated AD DNS servers?

TIA.



Eric Jones, Senior SE
Intel Server Group
(W) 336.424.3084
(M) 336.457.2591
www.vfc.com