The Best Damn Windows Server 2003 Book Period- P67:The latest incarnation of Microsoft’s server product,Windows Server 2003, brings many new features and improvements that make the network administrator’s job chapter will briefly summarize what’s new in 2003 and introduce you to the four members of the Windows Server 2003 family: the Web Edition, the Standard Edition, the Enterprise Edition, and the Datacenter Edition. | Chapter 19 Ensuring Active Directory Availability In this chapter 0 Understanding Active Directory Availability Issues 0 Performing Active Directory Maintenance Tasks 0 Backing Up and Restoring Active Directory 0 Troubleshooting Active Directory Availability Introduction In earlier chapters we looked at the Active Directory AD infrastructure as well as various interacting elements such as forest sites domains and trusts. We also examined the Global Catalog Schema and Group Policy in order to fully understand AD in a Windows Server 2003 environment. Now that we ve thoroughly reviewed this information we can discuss how to ensure AD availability. This chapter deals with how to maintain high availability of your Active Directory ll learn about the Active Directory database and the importance of system state data to Active Directory availability. We ll discuss fault tolerance plans as well as Active Directory performance ll find out how to perform necessary maintenance tasks such as defragging the database and you ll learn how to monitor or move the database. Next we ll address backup and restoration of the Active Directory and show you the different restoration methods that you can use and when each is appropriate. We ll walk you through the steps of performing both an authoritative and a normal restore. Finally you ll learn how to troubleshoot Active Directory availability problems. 627 628 Chapter 19 Ensuring Active Directory Availability Understanding Active Directory Availability Issues In this section we look at the core components of the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory service. First we discuss the structure and type of database including its files and related components. You ll also learn how updates are written to the Active Directory database and how it recovers in the event of a failure during the update process. We will review the key system configuration components that comprise the system state data and look at fault tolerance
