"So, what is a recommended domain controller I should use, a server class tower?" Depends on if you want to rack mount it, etc. If you're an HP person, I would recommend in rackmount a DL320. If you want a free standing tower, you'd be looking at the ML series, probably an ML310. "Also, what is ur email address heropsycho2177?" That's when I start billing. :-) TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

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start billing?

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Yeah, I'm a contractor. I get paid to know. I try to help others out on this forum, but there is a point when I should be paid. If you want that kind of access to my expertise, I'm gonna get paid for it. TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

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What heropsycho2177 is trying to say is, don't just focus on the fact that a DC is a low resource server; focus on the fact that a DC is critical to the function of your domain. Without it, your domain is down, and that could be more costly than saving a buck on electricity or hardware. I would never build a DC without a least a RAID controller for the drives, and redundant power supplies; I've seen too many of them fail. That said you could use a relatively inexpensive 1U rack server, or as mentioned, a virtual server on a server class VM machine.

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Oh I get it. Now I am a home user who is into domains and I have only 4 people in my family. I am the administrator and I host my own web site and email server from here. I also make a computer accessiable over the internet via the remote desktop connection so that I can work remotely. Now, I have 2 servers so far. One is a Custom Built Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 1.0 GB of RAM. The other server is a Visionman Server and it is a Pentium D 3.0 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. Now, my Domain Controller is the Pentium 4 3.00 GHz one and my Exchange Server, Web Server and File Server is on the Pentium D one. Am I making a mistake here? VMWare Server is also running on both servers, one Virtual Server is a Terminal Server and another is an extra domain controller, so basically, resources on my 2 servers are less because of those virtual servers running. I am planning to reconfigure my servers during the summer which is, redoing my whole entire domain. I just need to know that since I have a small domain with only 4 people, how would I get up a good domain controller plus with exchange and terminal servers?

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It all depends on your loads, and how much down time you are willing to accept in the event of a failure of a server. Is this a true production environment? Or is this just to learn? TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

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its for both. i will have to say it is for a production environment since people do use it and i am not testing software on my network but i am not earning money by having a domain, so i cant really say. even though it is a very small domain, do you still recommend me making one of my server-class towers a domain controller or will it not matter if i just use a basic pc. would it be better if i make a vmware on one of my server class pc's a domain controller if not?

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also so far, i haven't a problem with my server systems. my old win95 computer which is a pentium 2 233 mhz system was running windows server 2003 enterprise edition and it was a domain controller and a file server, that time i didn't know how to properlly set up a server system but it never had much problems. i didn't have an exchange server though, but i used roaming profies for the user accounts and now i don't.

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Jude, read through a few posts and you'll see what sort of people you are dealing with here. Deciding on the sort of server you need for a DC all depends on your environment. In some cases the machine you are describing will work fine. It is a good idea however to have two DCs in case one does die. In a heavy production environment with a lot of users a DC will stay busy, but generally speaking a DC is not a heavily loaded server. The traffic sent to a DC for authentication and logon requests is very small. In a perfect world all of our servers would be super power machines but that isn't always the case or possible. I've used small computers for DC plenty of times and while it isn't optimal it can certainly do the job. I would much rather have two low end DCs than one beefy one. Again, you want to have two DCs if possible. Another lesson you can learn here - don't take everything everyone says here as gospel. Some people are pretty full of themselves. If they were the mega contractors they portrayed themselves to be, they wouldn't have time to post to forums all day. Good luck.

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"Another lesson you can learn here - don't take everything everyone says here as gospel. Some people are pretty full of themselves. If they were the mega contractors they portrayed themselves to be, they wouldn't have time to post to forums all day." *rubbing eyes* Did you just insult me for taking the time to help someone? I'm not gonna apologize that I like to help people. "In a perfect world all of our servers would be super power machines but that isn't always the case or possible." And you don't take the time apparently to read what I said. It's not the performance I'm concerned about the most. It's the reliability. "If they were the mega contractors they portrayed themselves to be, they wouldn't have time to post to forums all day." Let's see... Who would be stupid enough to recommend using a small form factor PC as a DC for a production environment -- a small time nobody who severely lacks experience, or someone who has supported small to large even global enterprises? Go talk to ANY decent network engineer about running a bread and butter, MUST HAVE application on such a machine without even hard drive redundancy. This is basic 101 about making a service highly available. My goal for production is 99.999% uptime for critical services, and I deem your ability to login as a critical service. That's what makes a good network engineer. TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

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Hey, first off, my name is Nihal, not Jude. Jude is my saints name which comes before my first name. In future, please call me by Nihal. I wish I registered my name as Nihal instead of Jude Nihal. Now, speaking about the 2 DC's thing, could I just use a Powerful Pentium 4 3.00 GHz with about 1.5 GB or More RAM and make that a Domain Controller and then use VMWare and make 2 more DC's? Would that work? Or is it recommended to use 2 or 3 of the Small Factor Desktops and make them domain controllers. My environment is a very small environment. It is actually a home network with Servers making is a coorporate network. What is recommended?

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Look, it's all about what will perform fast enough to meet your needs, and what amount of downtime you're willing to accept. It doesn't seem like in an environment as small as yours that performance is a concern. It's more about how much downtime if any you can tolerate, how much money downtime costs you, how much it costs you for various procedures should something fail, etc. For example, if you don't have hard disk redundancy, how much will it cost you in time and money if your hard drive in your DC crashes? Well, hopefully you have two DC's, so you can continue to login. You'll need to get another hard disk, and if you don't have any additional software for easy restores, format the drive manually, reload the OS, do a restore, etc. If you had a RAID1 mirror, the DC would have never gone down aside from if it were a home built box, if it didn't support hot swapping on the drives, you'd have to power it off while you changed out the drives. In a server class system, they're hot swappable, so in this case 0 downtime even for that node. And once again, server class hardware is more reliable anyway, so the chances of ever having a hard drive failure is lower as is. Microsoft has general best practices in terms of redundancy, required hardware, etc. depending upon the load, but they don't get very specific. Why get a true server from a company like for example HP? There are numerous benefits. We talked about performance. We talked about the reliability. There's also the reduced amount of time spent doing things like installing the OS (HP servers include SmartStart for easy OS installation on first boot with all required drivers already preinstalled), easy maintenance (ROMPaq's and Softpaq's for easy one step firmware upgrades and driver upgrades), a large user base from which to draw upon to discover and correct issued with their product, technical support from people who have worked with thousands of these servers, so good chance they've seen whatever issues you're running into, etc. Add all those things up, and think about how much time they save, money they save in letting you focus on other things or loss of business due to loss of service, and you can see the server in the end usually ends up paying for itself. About VMWare - Virtualization does not provide hardware fault tolerance. IE, if you have two virtualized DC's running on the same physical node, same physical disks, etc., VMWare does not protect you from say a hard drive failure, or a motherboard failure, etc. Always look at whatever solution you're thinking about in terms of, "what if this were to go wrong"? If there's a single point of failure, it's a weakness in the design. All designs have weaknesses, but better designs are ones where whatever it takes to cause a loss of service is substantially decreasing in possibility. It's fairly common for hard drives to fail - if any single drive fails, can you still log on? Look at it in those terms. "Now, speaking about the 2 DC's thing, could I just use a Powerful Pentium 4 3.00 GHz with about 1.5 GB or More RAM and make that a Domain Controller and then use VMWare and make 2 more DC's?" Look at what I said just above and look at what you are proposing. If you for example load two DC's as VM's on this box, what are you gaining from two DC's on this box as VM's? You are alleviating the chance of AD going down from a problem with an OS installation within a single machine (physical or virtual), but look at a more likely scenario. What if this machine stores its host OS and virtual hard drive files on a single hard drive? If that single hard drive dies, you lose both your DC's. If these are your only two DC's, this is a bad design. What if the motherboard fails? Same thing. What if the power supply dies? Same thing. What if there's only one NIC, and it accidentally becomes unplugged, or the NIC dies? Same thing. What if the memory fails in it? Same thing. What if the host OS crashes, thereby stopping the virtual machines? Same thing. Do you see how you need to approach this? TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

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