DC Help

[Nick12345]

Hi all,

 

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post but I've been asked by a school to look at their IT. They are google cloud environment with (2x) sites:

One of the sites has an on-prem DC but the other one doesn't so people can't use their Windows devices at the other site, I'm looking to get a server installed for that site and to enable it to replicate to the other on-prem DC. How would I get the replication to work (apologies if it's a daft question) but I think the 2 sites are on seperate subnets so I just wanted to make sure I do it correctly.

In terms of the hardware I'm looking at a: DELL PowerEdge R250 (Xeon E2314, 32GB RAM, 2TB HDD).

 

If you need anymore information please ask & thanks in advance for any help / advice.

 

Thanks,

 

Nick

[tmoon-mint]

I think you're overthinking this to be honest. As long as the two DCs can communicate with each other they will replicate. It may be you need to configure your firewall to make this happen if this isnt the case already. You would just join your second server to your domain and then promote it to a DC, everything else is taken care of for you pretty much.

[ToyHeartsFan]

I’ve been a Technician, Network manager and ICT Operations manager in the education sector for more that 15 years then I was made redundant. Even with my experience this question leaves me scratching my head.

 

When a teacher is off sick they will gladly pay hundreds of pounds a day for cover without even thinking about it but they don’t want to pay for ICT support.

 

We all start some where but who are you a parent, governor, the schools ICT co-ordinator, the heads mate from down the pub that once fixed his laptop? There are an abundance of third party ICT companies for schools that will take on projects like this but there is a reason that they will charge £600+ a day.

 

Are the two sites connected via a dedicated fibre link or point to point Wifi, do they have some sort of wan configured by the ISP, do the sites have layer 3 switches, are they using VLANS, what firewall is in place is it on site or cloud based, do the two sites even use the same ISP?

 

You aren’t going to get a step by step answer for a question this complicated with so little information.

 

At the second site, either the router or layer 3 switch will be providing DHCP and DNS to their chrome books so why can’t they use their windows devices? Laptops can be configured to cache login details when the DC isn’t available its why they still work when teachers take them home. If you mean the users can’t connect to their home directories or shared drives or get updates from the WSUS server that’s not just a matter of having a second DC all that will do is provide authentication and take over DHCP and DNS from the router.

 

 

Yes its perfectly possible to connect multiple sites but its not something many of us will have had to do. Even then I would also be considering using something like Always on VPN instead particularly if there is a possibility of more sites being added in the future.

 

 

The results I got from a quick google search on your suggested server showed they had SATA drives; I wouldn’t even consider a server that used SATA even if they are enterprise class SATA lacks features that SAS provides. I’d be looking at a server with SAS drives and a RAID controller as a minimum. If it is only being used as a DC and not as a file server then it doesn’t need anything like 2TB of storage and smaller enterprise SSD’s or NVME’s and a RAID controller would be a better solution.

[ToyHeartsFan]

I think you're overthinking this to be honest. As long as the two DCs can communicate with each other they will replicate. It may be you need to configure your firewall to make this happen if this isnt the case already. You would just join your second server to your domain and then promote it to a DC, everything else is taken care of for you pretty much.

 

 

If the two networks were already communicating over a WAN of some sort then the windows devices should already be able to connect to the existing DC on the other site.

 

If not then they need to look at the Routers, firewalls, access controll lists on switches, and VLAN configurations, first step would be to contact the ISP for help but the two sites might not even have the same ISP...