How to mereg Admin and Curric domains

[dezt]

I've been thinking about merging our 2 domains for quite some time now, however, I don't know how to do it. I have read many posts on here asking if 2 domains are used or not but none of them show how to actually merge the 2 domains and come out with one at the end.

 

My curric domain has around 450 PC's and about 800 users.

My admin domain has about 20 PC's and around 20 users.

 

Ideally i want 1 AD domain to make administration easier. SIMS is on the admin DC.

 

Has anyone got a guide they could email to me or direct me to some links that will show me how to sort this out.

 

Thanks

[JW9]

I look after a school in Bradford that has an admin and curric network on the same infrastructure. The Admin is a static IP setup and the curric dhcp. There is a trust, one way from Admin < Curric. I like the setup as there is a comfortable separation of the two and not much potential for a school wide issue when youre fiddling with a curric dns server. The two domains talk to each other via dns and forward off to the router when needed. Security from this model is simple as they were designed separately, but this can be adapted easily (one way) so admin users can access curric resources. There is currently no need for any curric user to access admin... unless you want it. Simple.

[FragglePete]

I sort of done similar a couple of years back; I've still got two domains as the SIMS server is on Admin but users in Curriculum needed to access it for Electronic Registration. Both domains are on the same infrastructure anyway but I intend to move the SIMS onto the Curriculum domain when we replace the SIMS server and get everything migrated over by Capita, but that plan has been put back each time but is definately on the books for this Summer.

 

I just implemented a two way trust between the domains and then made use of a loop back GPO that ran a different set of policies depending on the 'type' of machine you logged into. For admin machines, they just get a standard Windows 7 affair, where as the Curriculum machines which are CSE based are completely locked down with the Start Menu showing only programs. This stopped the issue of teachers who originally had two seperate logins for each domain, now they can use just the one. I just worked my way around all the admin machines and users and moved files, etc over manually. Only about 12 PCs at the time so got round quite quick.

 

Looking forward to flattening the Admin domain completely over Summer which will make things easier, but to be honest even in the current setup now it's no major hassle looking after it as there are now no users on Admin.

 

Best of luck

 

Pete

[timbo343]

I did ours about 4 years ago and never looked back, took about 2 days all in all to do. We had about 15 machines on the admin network then. To be fair all you had to do was to make sure that you have a user account for each user on the cirric network and move each machine over. The SIMS server at the time was just a case of demoting the server (making sure all users were on the cirric network) and adding it to the cirric network, just like a client machine. If you are running exchange in the cirric then disconnect the users account and reconnect the mailbox with the new user on the main network.

[achedgy]

I've done this a few times, always just incorporated the admin pc's into the curriculum domain. Removed them from the admin domain, dcpromo'd the admin servers down to member servers, then dcpromo'd them into the curric domain, added the pc to the curric domain. All pretty straight forward, had to change the ip's on the admin servers and any printers that had static addresses. This is presuming they are sharing infrastructure of course...

[dezt]

Cheers for the advice guys. I'm going to be changing our curric domain dhcp to the ip range we've been allocated by the LA rather than using our private ip range that we currently use. Once I've done that incorporating the admin pcs to the curric domain should be easier, then I'll be able to move the server across. Hopefully I'll get that done over the Easter and summer holidays. Ip range in Easter, incorporate the pcs in summer.

 

Thanks again everyone