Home Directories on a DC - Good or Bad

[Kyle]

Time to upgrade one of the servers at a school i go to. I was wondering what peoples thoughts are on having home areas on a DC?

I have seen several schools and some have them on a DC and others on a member server.

I was wondering if there is any MS recommendations or what other users think?

[zag]

Worst idea ever!

I speak from experience having inherited a DC + fileserver computer that consequently failed. Absolute nightmare to fix when the AD got corrupted and I managed to loose all the files while trying to restore the AD.

My advice, buy a quick standard workstation as a primary DC, buy the same machine and make it a second DC but put it in a different location on the network.

Then buy a Raid5 capable server for the file server/home directories.

Makes disaster recovery a breeze.

[GlennT]

Agreed!
Single point of failure. In an ideal world you should use one server for one purpose. [Obviously, in education that rarely happens!]

[Ryan]

Gulp, you don't wanna see what i've got on server 1 then

*runs off*

[Andi]

We've had all our home directories, apps and profiles on one of our DCs here for coming up to 3 years without hitch...but I think that's mainly down to luck.

This half term I've been moving the users home directories onto our new NAS, and I plan to move the profiles at some point too, but that's less important.

Apps I think might be a bit of a pain due to the file path change, but will slowly happen.

[torledo]

Time to upgrade one of the servers at a school i go to. I was wondering what peoples thoughts are on having home areas on a DC?

I have seen several schools and some have them on a DC and others on a member server.

I was wondering if there is any MS recommendations or what other users think?

it's not an ideal scenario - best to seperate tasks on to different servers.....file serving will need the thorughput in terms of multiple gigabit adapters, and disk performance/capacity - so that's where the main investment should go.

A dedicated DC won't have anywhere near the same requirements, so as someone else has suggested you can run a DC off a relatively cheap server.
What's most important with an Active Directory infrastructure is fault tolerance and reliability.

a dedicated NAS is the best device for CIFS file serving, and i don't mean windows storage server. I really really hate WSS. You'd be better off building something with openfiler than wasting you're money on a WSS device.

[Michael]

In an ideal world I would have multiple servers, but in practice it all comes down to cost. A cheaper/easier solution is to have multiple hard drives in one server. This is how I keep costs down at all the sites I support. I also ensure that all servers operate at gigabit to maximise throughput to the network, which mostly runs at 10/100 or wireless.

[CyberNerd]

If you need to run on the same box then virtualise the DC. My experience is that windows system recovery tools don't work as advertised when you have lots of shares on the same box.

[Heebeejeebee]

Agreed!
Single point of failure. In an ideal world you should use one server for one purpose. [Obviously, in education that rarely happens!]

We do this now (spent crap loads on servers these last two years). Each server serves a particular purpose (in the main), DC1, DC2, apps, files, MIS, mail, printserver, exams, webserver, files, proxy etc.

We mainly use HP Proliant servers all with RAID (0,5,1 often combined)

Must be one of the lucky ones - I wonder how long it'll last.

HBJB