Designing the Active Directory Structure

Domain Planning Process

Your domain plan will determine the availability of the directory on the network, the query traffic characteristics of clients, and the replication traffic characteristics of domain controllers.

Each forest that you create will contain one or more domains. The steps to creating a domain plan for a forest are:

Determine the number of domains in each forest.
Choose a forest root domain.
Assign a DNS name to each domain to create a domain hierarchy.
Plan DNS server deployment.
Optimize authentication with shortcut trust relationships.
Understand the impact of changes to the domain plan after deployment.

When creating the Domain Plan for each forest, you will most likely need to consult the following groups:

Current domain administrators that are responsible for user accounts, groups, and computers
Teams that manage and monitor your physical network
Teams that manage the DNS service for your network
Security teams