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Supporting the Branch Office

It would be nice if all your servers were set up in a single location so that you could keep an eye on them, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, today’s enterprise often consists of a corporate headquarters and a bunch of remote branch offices, sometimes scattered all around the globe. What’s worse, you might be the main IT person stuck there at headquarters, while people who don’t know a router from a switch have hands-on physical access to your servers, which just happen to be located out there in remote sites instead of being safe under your watchful eye. What can you do to maintain control? “My precioussss! gollum…”

Windows Server 2008 has several technologies that help you keep control and be Lord of the Servers in your enterprise. Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs) are a new type of domain controller that hosts a read-only replica of your Active Directory database. If you combine RODCs with the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature first introduced in Windows Vista, you no longer have to worry about thieves (or silly employees) walking off with one of your domain controllers and all your goodies. Restartable Active Directory Domain Services lets you stop Active Directory services on your domain controllers so that updates can be applied or offline defragmentation of the database can be performed, and it can do this without requiring you to reboot your machine. This is a big improvement that not only reduces down-time, but makes your domain controllers easier to manage, which is a plus when they’re located at a remote site. Other improvements-such as delegation improvements, the new SMB 2.0 protocol, and the enhanced DFSR introduced in Windows Server 2003 R2-help make Windows Server 2008 an ideal platform for domain controllers that need to be located at branch offices.

Want to find out more about these improvements? Chapter 7 covers RODC and Restartable AD DS, while various other improvements can be found in Chapter 12, “Other Features and Enhancements.”