I agree. SMB business can be very complex.
Can you expand on the idea that VM's aren't working well for you? I'm trying
to understand the difference between that and a multiple domain DC for that
scenario.
I'd have to say that smaller, cheaper dc's (desktop class?) have always
worked well for me in the past when doing functionality testing.
Scalability requires full-blown hardware. But I'm not seeing where VM
environments aren't working as well as you'd like a physical environment to
work? What's the difference in this situation?
For availability, I could see some value in a DC configured to host mulitple
domains because I could designate one to be the failover for several
domains. Otherwise, I'm not sure I get it. Is this like a LPAR concept
you're talking about? That would be more helpful to you in these situations?
If so, how is that different than VM's?
Test environments are notoriously able to take down servers without warning.
I would often prefer to use a VM to decrease that risk of consuming all
resources to destruction. That provides some isolation while not requiring
extra hardware.
VM's require licenses (the OS and apps do) FWIW. You're only saving on the
hardware and environmentals that I can see, but I'm trying to understand
what I'm missing.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charlie Kaiser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org>
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 11:05 AM
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Active Directory wish list
For us, it's the ability to run parallel domains for test/development
purposes. We have our production domain, my IT test domain, and our LOB
application test domain. I'd have another IT test domain if I had the
available hardware right now.
We are required to test and document all changes to the LOB app and a
significant number of people work in that test domain. Running it on VMs
or old hardware doesn't cut it gracefully, although that's what I do.
Since management won't write the check for additional hardware/licenses,
we do what we can.
But if we had one beefy server to replace 3, and one server license to
replace 3, it would be much more cost effective to do, and would
increase performance for the user community.
In my last gig, we had multiple domains that were used for development
and customer support departments. The support kids especially needed
multiple domains to recreate customer environments and various software
versions.
I can think of a lot of reasons to need multiple domains/forests in an
SMB environment. Regulatory compliance, 24x7 availability that mandates
full testing prior to implementation in production, customer support
domains, etc. Just because a business is small doesn't mean it can't
have complex requirements...
**********************
Charlie Kaiser
W2K3 MCSA/MCSE/Security, CCNA
Systems Engineer
Essex Credit / Brickwalk
510 595 5083
**********************
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Al Mulnick
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 7:10 AM
To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Active Directory wish list
I'm curious, Charlie and Neil. What services do these SMB's
offer that they
need multiple instances of DC's? I realize that a best
practice is to have
multiple servers that can provide some failure tolerant
behaviors, but I'm
wondering what type of work a SMB does that requires multiple
full blown AD
domain instances and therefore multiple servers etc. Can you
expand that?
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