Active Directory Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. DNS and DHCP

13.0. Introduction

Active Directory is tightly coupled with the Domain Name System (DNS) name resolution service. Windows clients (running Windows 2000 or later) and domain controllers alike use DNS to locate domain controllers that are housed in a particular site or that serve a particular function (like a Global Catalog server). Each domain controller registers numerous resource records (RRs) in DNS to advertise its services as a domain controller, global catalog server, PDC Emulator, etc.

One of the innovative uses of Active Directory is as a store for DNS data. Instead of using the primary and secondary zone transfer method, or even the more recent NOTIFY method (RFC 1996) to replicate zone data between non-AD-integrated DNS servers, AD-integrated zones store the zone data in Active Directory and use the same replication process used to replicate other data between domain controllers. The one catch with AD-integrated zones is that the DNS server must also be a domain controller, and overloading DNS server responsibilities on your domain controllers may not be something you want to do if you plan on supporting a large volume of DNS requests. You can integrate forward and reverse lookup zones into Active Directory, as well as stub zones, a feature introduced in Windows Server 2003 that is used to maintain information about remote DNS zones and to reduce zone transfer traffic across WAN links. Additionally, Windows Server 2008 introduces the GlobalNamesZone ...