AD and DC Builds, tweaks, configurations... (1)
I received a mail from a blog reader (Jim) who asked:
"Can you provide any insight regarding and tweaks or configuration settings you guys use on your DC builds?"
Sure, I'm happy to do this, so here I am typing happily along, and realized that there is a lot more configuration/tweaking/settings that we use than I should reasonably put into a single blog entry. Instead this will be the first of multiple entries...
So, let's start at the very beginning (it's a very good place to start)... With our standard hardware platforms. All MS IT domain controllers are based on either our "large" or "small" SKU...internally, we call these are DC-E (enterprise) or DC-F (field) platforms.
The DC-E specs are:
The DC-F specs are:
All of our DC's run x64 OS's...well...unless we have some dogfood requirement for 32-bit OS runtime (which we periodically do)...but for all intents and purposes, let's just pretend because we really WANT to run all 64-bit OS's.
Somewhere previously I mentioned that our average DIT size is 10-11GB on disk. The DC-E with 16GB of RAM let's us cache the entire database with room for growth, the DC-F with only 8GB of RAM is usually deployed where we need services, but don't have the load so caching is less of an issue. In that case, the DC-F is significantly cheaper for us.