Domain Controller Placement

You should avoid making every Windows Server 2003 into a domain controller. This hurts performance by taking CPU cycles for replication and directory management. It also makes the replication topology unnecessarily complex.

The initial number of domain controllers depends primarily on fault tolerance. You should always have at least two domain controllers in a domain to ensure that you have a full copy of Active Directory ready for action in case either server should fail. I recommend having three so that you can do maintenance on one server while the other two are up and ready for work.

Reliability and performance then become the primary criteria for selecting domain controllers. Plan on putting at least two domain ...

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