Determining Domain Migration Strategies
Determining Domain Migration Strategies |
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Depending on your migration plan, you might choose to restructure your domains immediately after upgrade, in place of an upgrade, or as a general domain redesign some time in the future. These options are described as follows:
The most likely time for domain restructure is after an upgrade, as the second phase of migration to Windows 2000. The upgrade has then addressed the less complex migration situations, such as groups of domains in which the trust structure is essentially correct and in which there are no administrative issues.
When you choose to restructure after upgrade, most likely your goals involve reworking the domain structure to reduce complexity, or to bring resource domains with low rights administrators into the forest in a secure way.
You might feel that your current domain structure cannot be salvaged (for example, if you need to redesign your directory services infrastructure to take advantage of Active Directory), or that you cannot afford to jeopardize the stability of the current production environment during migration. In either case, the easiest migration path might be to design and build a pristine forest: an ideal Windows 2000 forest isolated from the current production environment. This ensures that business can carry on normally during pilot project operation and that the pilot project eventually becomes the production environment.
After you have built the pilot project, you can begin domain restructuring by migrating a small number of users, groups, and resources into the pilot. When this phase has been completed successfully, transition the pilot project into a staged migration to the new environment. Subsequently, make Windows 2000 the production environment, decommission the old domain structure, and redeploy the remaining resources.
At this stage, domain restructure takes place as part of a general domain redesign in a pure Windows 2000 environment. This might occur several years down the line, when, for reasons such as organizational change or a corporate acquisition, the current structure becomes inappropriate.