Consolidating Three Disparate Active Directory Domains Into One New Windows Server 2008 Domain.

[andrewjamesb]

Hi

 

I need some help if possible to give an overview of consolidating three disparate Active Directory Domains into one new Windows Server 2008 Domain.

 

Covering the following areas

 

Planning

Testing

Implementation

 

Pay specific attention to the areas you would need to take into consideration and how you might mitigate any potential issues you may encounter (if any).

 

Thanks

Andy

[ICTCity]

Sorry...

 

You have 3 domains: dom1, dom2, dom3. Which are SEPARATES.

 

You want ONE domain: MyNewDomain. It will contain all the "old" 3 domains... right?

 

dom1, 2 and 3 are running on Windows... 200?

How many users do you have?

[andrewjamesb]

Hi

 

We have 3 domains on Server 2003 and we want to consolidate all three into one new domain on Server 2008

 

Need to know how would you go about planning, testing and implementing the change over?

 

There is 2,000+ user base

 

Also what problems could you see arising

 

 

Thanks

 

Andy

[andrewjamesb]

Hi

 

Thanks for the response. This is for the company I work with. They have 2,000+ employee user base and 300+ servers (server 2003 currently) looking to go over to server 2008 R2 within a virtual environment

 

I will look into using ADMT. How would I start with this?

 

How would I setup the trusts? Would you have the new AD domain on server 2008 running alongside the old AD Domain on server 2003. Please could you explain how this would work

 

Can you help on how I would go about undertaking the following areas

 

Planning

Testing

Implementation

 

Basically where would I start? Any advice would be gratefully appreciated also on potential problems that may arise

 

Many Thanks

Andy

[ICTCity]

You can merge 3 domains into 1 or merge 3 domain controllers into one...

 

If you want ONE domain controller (yeah, more then one but basically each of them will do the same thing), you must pay attention because of network traffic. That means you can have 10gb of ram but your DC may be slow. The bottleneck is (are) CPU and/or NIC.

 

Is not important (just for now) HOW to migrate from 2k3 to 2k8, first you must understand WHAT do you want to do. Why do you have 3 domains? And why do you want to merge them? When you say CONSOLIDATE, it means you want something like: domain1.MYDOMAIN.LOCAL, domain2.MYDOMAIN.LOCAL, domain3.MYDOMAIN.LOCAL or something like: domain.domain1.com, domain.domain2.com, domain.domain3.com?