Active Directory work for customer...

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Out of curiosity, I am am thinking about splitting our customers internal FSMO roles that are currently on one server and putting 3 (Infrastructure, RID, and PDC) on a second server. That way we have 1 server that hosts the Schema and Domain name roles and one server hosting Infrastructure, RID, and PDC roles. I've already made sure that the servers are GC's and from a performance perspective things look good. Would you guys recommend to keep all the FSMO roles on the same server or split up the roles?

Just a side now, I am restructuring the Active Directory for our customer with new OU's, fixing up GPO's, etc... so I figured I would add the FSMO role management to the task.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

The argument for doing this is twofold. First, it means you're not placing all of your eggs in a single basket (so if you lose one server, half of your 'roles' still function), and the second pertains to performance, since a server with the PDCe role is the one which is most likely to be utilized (it remains the busiest server), and thus as you remove roles from it, you reduce any 'potential' load that may occur due to needs from the other FSMO roles.

Admittedly, once your environment has been setup, you're not very likely to rely on the Domain Naming or Schema Master roles (used to extend your schema or add new domains to your forest, and that's just about it), but every little helps.

And keeping the Infrastructure Master, PDCe and RID roles on the same server in a small environment is also a recommended practice, so I'd say go for it. Just make sure you updated any documented DR practices.

 

Thanks Shinigami, I appreciate the input! What you said is pretty much what's been on my mind, I was just curious to get some opinions and see if I am missing something...

 

Personally from a performance and redundancy viewpoint I'd split the roles that comprise the FSMO roles. I quite like and second the point Shinigami made