Determining Domain Migration Strategies

Planning Domain Restructure

While domain upgrade allows you to maintain as much of your current environment as possible, including your domain structure, domain restructure allows you to redesign the forest according to the needs of your organization. Though domain restructure can have various results, typically your current structure is reorganized into fewer, larger domains.

Windows 2000 provides native functionality to allow domain restructure as follows:

Security principals can be moved from one domain to another while maintaining access to resources available before the move.
Domain controllers can be moved from one domain to another without complete reinstallation of the operating system.

Note

Domain restructure is not a requirement for deploying Windows 2000 Server. You can restructure over time as needed. It can be an intensive, time-consuming operation to move computers to new domains and update or verify access control.

To assist in your domain migration, Microsoft has created Domain Migration Basic Utilities. These utilities are a set of Component Object Model (COM) objects and sample scripts designed to form the basis of customer-adapted administration utilities, and to support a number of domain migration examples that Microsoft has documented and tested. The examples have been developed based on feedback from customers concerning their migration requirements. The basic utility ClonePrincipal is described later in this chapter.