Hello, welcome back to your free Active Directory training course. In this video I will look
at what you will need hardware and software wise to start using Active Directory. Firstly
because you start installing Active Directory, you need to ensure the server that you are
using meets the minimum hardware requirements for Active Directory.
If you are running Windows Server 2008 you need a 1.4 Gigahertz CPU for 64 bit
systems. For a 32 bit system you need a 1 Gigahertz CPU. Active Directory requires
servers called domain controllers to be deployed to authenticate users. Domain controllers
generate Kerberos tickets that allow the user to access resources on the network. Kerberos
tickets are mathematical time consuming to create so on a busy domain controller I would
suggest getting a much faster CPU. These figures that I am giving you are the
minimum supplied by Microsoft which Windows Server 2008 will work on. The minimum requirements
won’t give you the fastest Windows experience so you should always try and exceed these
values where possible. If you are running Windows Server 2008 R2
with or without the service pack 1 on a 64 bit system you need to be running once again
a 1 point 4 Gigahertz CPU. If you are running a dual core 64 bit CPU Microsoft have drop
the requirement to a 1 point 3 Gigahertz CPU. Windows Server 2008 R2 does not support
32 bit CPU’s so you will need to run windows server 2008 if you have a 32 bit CPU.
For RAM Microsoft recommends a minimum of 512 megabytes of RAM. In a testing environment
we run Active Directory domain controllers with 512 megabytes of RAM and they run o.k.
These servers have little to no load. I would personal recommend at least 1 gigabyte in
a production network for a windows server 2008 domain controller. On a busy network
I would recommend 2 gigabytes but generally speaking the more RAM the better.
For hard disk space Windows Server 2008 requires a minimum of 32 gigabytes for 32 bit or 64
gigabytes for a 64 bit system. In reality these are the minimum requirements given by
Microsoft so when installing Active Directory I would go for a least 100 Gigabytes. This
gives plenty of room to grow. Now day’s hard disk space is quiet cheap so allocate
a descent amount of disk space when possible. The last requirement is that you need to be
running Enterprise, data center, standard, foundation or the HPC edition of windows
Server 2008. Active Directory domain services cannot be installed on the Itanium or web
editions of windows sever 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
One last point I would like to mention is if you are upgrading to windows server 2008.
If this is the case you can’t upgrade from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2008.
You also need to be running at least windows server 2003 with service pack 2. Lastly upgrades
between different architecture are not support. That is you can’t upgrade for a 32bit operating
system to a 64 bit operating system. Where possible, I advise you to perform a
clean install of Window Server 2008 when deploying an Active Directory domain controller. All
thought it is possible to upgrade any existing an existing domain controller running Windows
Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 you do risk taking any problems with that domain
controller with you. However having said that, Microsoft does support upgrades and
sometimes the business need will require you to upgrade an existing server as spare
hardware may not be available. Once you have your hardware and software ready
there is one last point to take into consideration and that is DNS. DNS or domain name System
is a system that allows computer to locate resources on the network. The reason it is
important is that Active Directory can’t function without it.
When you deploy Active Directory you can use an existing Microsoft DNS infrastructure
or install Microsoft DNS with the Active Directory install. If you are using anther
DNS solution in your company, for example UNIX DNS, this can also be used. The important
thing to consider is that you need DNS on the network for Active Directory to operate.
DNS is fundamental to Active Directory, later in the course I will go into a lot of
detail about DNS and how it works with Active Directory. When you install Active Directory
the wizard will give you the choice to install Microsoft DNS with the Active Directory
install. Even though DNS is so important you can accept the defaults and Microsoft
will do all the hard work for you. This is why I don’t cover DNS until later in the
course. In the next video I will install Active Directory
now that all the theory is out of the way. I hope you have enjoyed this free video. For
more free videos in this series and other free course please see are web page or you
tube channel. Thanks for watching.