Introduction

  • 2 minutes

Learn about essential management and maintenance tasks for Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) domain controllers, including their deployment, backup and recovery, and schema management. Find out about design considerations regarding the optimal number, roles, and location of domain controllers.

Scenario

Contoso, Ltd. is a financial services company in Seattle with major offices located throughout the world. Most of its compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server. This includes virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2016 hosts.

Contoso IT staff are migrating Contoso on-premises servers to Windows Server 2022. As part of the migration, Contoso plans to expand into additional sites and use virtualization to help expedite bringing a new site online. The company is also generating larger volumes of data with plans for even more data in the future. Because of this, the company needs flexible storage options. Finally, Contoso plans to increase their use of virtualization to optimize their computing environment because many physical servers are underutilized.

As a newly hired Windows Server administrator, you'll be responsible for managing and maintaining Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) operations, including domain controller deployments, and AD DS backup and recovery. You also need to identify and implement the optimal placement of such AD DS roles as operation masters or global catalog. In addition, you've been asked to implement custom schema extensions to accommodate deployment of a newly developed in-house application.

After completing this module, you'll understand how to accomplish these tasks.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

  • Deploy and maintain AD DS domain controllers.
  • Describe the AD DS global catalog role and its placement considerations.
  • Describe AD DS operations master roles, their placement considerations, and their management tasks.
  • Describe the AD DS schema and its management tasks.

Prerequisites

To get the best learning experience from this module, it's important that you have knowledge and experience of the following areas:

  • Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2016.
  • Core networking technologies.
  • AD DS.