One of the frequent issues we see when supporting Small to Medium businesses (SMB) is replication issues caused by problems with physical Active Directory design. When I say “physical design” I don’t mean forests, tree roots, domains, child domains, etc. Those are elements of logical design. Physical design, in a nutshell, is how you configure the various elements in Active Directory Sites & Services. When these elements work harmoniously, Active Directory will reward you with fast & efficient replication. If mistakes are made, they’ll be compounded by the amount of replication traffic and at worst (typically in coordination with some other misconfiguration) can bring replication grinding to a halt. So let’s go over physical Active Directory design at a basic level.

The first rule of physical design is “You do not talk about Fight Club.” Wait a minute……wrong topic; my mistake. The first rule of physical design is to let…