How many domain controllers

I've always had countless replication issues between my two DCs and the worse case scenario happened since 4 weeks ago.. I spent these whole 4 weeks trying to resolved the replication issues but have had no joy. These days, you can throw so so many resources at the server, that you don't really need multiple DCs just for HA. Henceforth, I'm gonna stick with my one DC Single domain in single forest, GC must be on all DCs, and there is no benefit in spreading the roles in a small environment.

If fact , logically, you decrease your MTBF. FSMO roles should be transferred before rebooting a server that has FSMO roles, then transferred back But in a small environment , you can get away with a quick reboot ;. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question.

Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Spiceworks Help Desk. The help desk software for IT. Track users' IT needs, easily, and with only the features you need. Learn More ».

Thai Pepper. BenSpain This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. JasonT This person is a verified professional. Sosipater This person is a verified professional. You have your students on the same subnet and domain as your staff? Ghost Chili. Paragraph Mar 6, at UTC. Sosipater wrote: You have your students on the same subnet and domain as your staff? I know, i was a student once ; Two should suffice, but if you do go the dual domain route you'll want to toss in another two more if you think the sticky guys need a backup.

However, you should have at least two domain controllers for redundancy, and preferably one domain controller in each site. With being a smaller organization such as your, I honestly could not think of a good reason to segregate all of your FSMOs. Place them all together on your most well provisioned and reliable DC.

You can use the below guidelines from FSMO placement. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Learn More. Windows Server TechCenter. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Once you determine where domain controllers should be placed, your next challenge is determining how many domain controllers a site needs to fulfill the needs for each domain in the site. The number of users from a domain that are located in a site is the primary factor in determining the number of domain controllers the site needs for that domain.

To determine the basic number of domain controllers required for each domain in a site, consider the following:. Where I work we currently have 1 domain controller for around 35 PCs. Do we need to have 2 DCs? Would it be beneficial to us to have 2 with one as a failover if something happens to the 1st one? If your one Domain Controller goes down users will be unable to log in to the domain, access resources in the domain, won't have access to their Exchange mailbox, etc.

If your one Domain Controller dies and is unrecoverable you will essentially lose your domain It's always good to have redundancy in your network, but if everything is in a single hardware, I would say it is better to invest in a good backup and snapshot policy. AD DS is a replicated database where many things are possible on a replicated DC: login, group policy deployment. Should a "primary" be lost and multiple DCs exist, end user functions continue, while operations masters roles can be moved easily.

The answer is entirely about risk management and availability, so you need to look at what your requirements are and decide if the answer is 1, or 2, or more. Many people automatically jump to two, however very often this is without actually looking at requirements and costs.

Do you need it to be available 24x7? At a minimum you will need to add a second one, as the first one will need to be rebooted from time to time. If it fails, what are your recovery point objective, and recovery time objective? Since it is a virtual machine you may setup checkpoints such that you can restore to last night or the last hour in a few minutes or less, so you might not need a second DC for recovery purposes. Note since you comment you are new Since it would presumably be virtualized you should also look at whether 2 DCs on a single host provides the redundancy you need disk failure, motherboard, CPU, etc.

Having 2 DCs will not help if your single virtualization host is filling the room with smoke. Are you worried about a flood wiping out your office? Also look at the cost of an additional license and memory, and the cost of the additional complexity.