Number of Domain Controllers

[teklogic]

Hi,

I am having a review of the system that I took over a few years back, I need to make some space on my VM servers. I am pretty sure that I have an over kill on domain controllers. We have around 800 students / 150 members of staff / around 30 visitor accounts. The domains are spilt up as the following;

1) Top Level Domain (4)
2) Child for Students (4)
3) Child for Staff (2)

The numbers next to the domain structure are the domain controllers. I am unsure why the last NM set them up in this fasion. I think I will be safe with 2 in each, I want to leave myself some redundancy.

I am looking for some firm evidence of numbers as well as friendly advice. I want to make sure I have belt and braces etc.

[FN-GM]

I would go for 2 in each due to the number of domains you have. We have one flat domain with 3 domain controllers.

Have you considered moving everything into the parent domain?

[teklogic]

Hi, Thanks for the reply.

We will be moving to a new domain in the next 2 years as I am currently working through a new IT contract as part of the PFS funding. I am just looking to impliment a few smaller systems in the remaining time to get the staff use to the new ways before the new system gets here. Hence why I need to make some space.

[jamesfed]

I would be looking at 2 in each as well - that way you can loose one and everything will (largely be ok).

We are running 3x DCs at the moment but will be condensing that down into 2 that purely do DC work (right now one of our DCs is a file store, the other also does DHCP + WSUS and one other looks after WDS) over the summer holiday mainly on the grounds of keeping everything simple.

I would say if it isn't broken don't fix it but having 1 parent and 2 child domains for a school of your size (pretty much the same as ours) does seem a little excessive....

[teklogic]

I thought it was a little over kill, I have left it for now as the system has had other issues and the dc's have always run well. We have already got separte servers for main services as well, so on that front I am luckily but it does take up un-necessary resources.

[SYNACK]

I'd go for two most of the time. The one time I have made a fileserver a DC was to remove the requirement for a domain prefix for authentication as they still had users accessing it from non-domained machines and domain\username was going to be a hard sell when they were used to just username.

[twin--turbo]

We have 4, 2 on each site with just one domain across a wan link running ~2000 Users.

TT

[alttab]

Hi,

I am having a review of the system that I took over a few years back, I need to make some space on my VM servers. I am pretty sure that I have an over kill on domain controllers. We have around 800 students / 150 members of staff / around 30 visitor accounts. The domains are spilt up as the following;

1) Top Level Domain (4)
2) Child for Students (4)
3) Child for Staff (2)

The numbers next to the domain structure are the domain controllers. I am unsure why the last NM set them up in this fasion. I think I will be safe with 2 in each, I want to leave myself some redundancy.

I am looking for some firm evidence of numbers as well as friendly advice. I want to make sure I have belt and braces etc.

i personally would have one physical and one virtual DC per domain. Having at least one physical DC for each domain would technically be belt and braces in my view.