Introduction

This guide focuses on the design of the directory service solution.

The design was created using the guidance provided in the Reference Blueprints, specifically the Directory Service Blueprint. The designs detailed in this guide were formulated using real world scenario specifications, specifically the Centralized Data Center (CDC) and Satellite Branch Office (SBO) scenarios. These scenarios are outlined in the Introduction to Windows Server System Reference Architecture document and a further level of detail is provided in the Lab Implementation of Windows Server System Reference Architecture document.

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	Who Should Read This Guide
	Business Need

Who Should Read This Guide

This guide is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals responsible for the design and deployment of a directory service infrastructure in enterprises that are similar in scale and scope to the CDC or SBO scenarios. This guide provides service-level guidance, and the reader is expected to be able to follow the technical discussions and understand the details that are provided.

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Business Need

The directory service design needs defined in the Reference Blueprints can be summarized as follows.

Typically, most organizations face the common issue of managing different kinds of information that they create and use everyday, especially sensitive employee information and how computing resources are allocated and used.

Ideally, this information should be stored in a single secure and manageable solution, such as the organization’s directory service. Use of Microsoft Active Directory directory service makes it possible for the Contoso organization to store and manage all this information in a single data repository.

It is important to understand the difference between designing a directory service solution for a single CDC scenario (such as was tested in the test labs) and an entire Contoso scenario. It is very likely that the designs arrived at for these two scenarios would be different. The full Contoso scenario has been deliberately used as the criterion for this design process in order to address a large and complex network infrastructure; this type of scenario requires a detailed understanding of the complex nature of international communication links and each site’s topology and politics. The design process for a single CDC scenario is far simpler, because it has only one physical topology to consider.

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