Number of domain controllers?

[thirdeye]

I currently have 4 Domain controllers in our network but I'm not sure that we need 4. It's been set up like this since before I started and my Director doesn't really know why there are 4. He believes that they were just set up for the hell of it.

They all seem to be working ok, but I have them running in 2k3 mixed mode and they don't seem to play well with each other. I'm getting tons of errors that point to AD collisions and I think it may have something to do with the 2 different versions. I currently have 2 Win2k3 DCs (one being the primary) and then 2 Win2k DCs. I'm wondering if I axe the the 2 Win2k DCs (not physically just demote them) if the 2 Win2k3 ones will be able to support all the users. If not would 3 do the job, since upgrading them all is what I plan to do but not in the immediate future.

Thanks

 

[dphantom]

Assuming this is all one site, then you do not need 4 DCs. Get rid of the W2000 ones, go native with 2003 and you should see a more stable environment.

I have 500 users and 2 DCs including remote locations. No problems except first thing in the morning when it can be a bit slow, but not unuisable. IE instead of a 1-2 minute login it might be a 2-3 minute login with script processing, GPO etc...

 

[netsysadmin]

I would say you would be fine with the two Win2003 DC's. Are you running anything else on those machine like a file server, apps....etc? If you do get rid of the extra two make sure you DCPromo them or you will be in a world of AD hell!!

John

 

[spidey07]

-edit-
I would think 2-3 would be fine just for redundancy purposes.

 

[thirdeye]

Well that's good news then, thanks for the advise. I did plan on using dcpromo to avoid any problems. As for serving other functions, the primary is also dhcp/dns as well as some light file sharing and the secondary 2k3 dc is a light file server and is running our garbage trend micro client-side anti-virus server.

 

[spidey07]

hmm, Trend Micro has usually been the preferred anti-virus. Had over 50,000 users on it without a hitch.

 

[thirdeye]

I'm not a big fan of what we have now, mostly because it doesn't seem to stop the viruses. Our problems seemed to slow down once I implemented our exchange server and started using Symantec Mail Security, but before that it would allow viruses to get by constantly. It could be a config issue too, since it was setup before I got here who knows how it was configured. It's caused a lot headaches for us though.