SITES-

Sites

By contrast to the logical grouping of Active Directory into forests, trees, domains, and OUs, Microsoft includes the concept of sites to group together resources within a forest according to their physical location and/or subnet. A site is a set of one or more IP subnets, which are connected by a high-speed, always available local area network (LAN) link. Figure 1-5 shows an example with two sites, one located in Chicago and the other in New York. A site can contain objects from more than one tree or domain within a single forest, and individual trees and domains can encompass more than one site. The use of sites enables you to control the replication of data within the Active Directory database as well as to apply policies to and computers or delegate administrative control to these objects within a single physical location. In addition, sites enable users to be authenticated by domain controllers in the same physical location rather than a distant location as often as possible. You should configure a single site for all work locations connected within a high-speed, always available LAN link and designate additional sites for locations separated from each other by a slower wide area network (WAN) link. Using sites permits you to configure Active Directory replication to take advantage

of the high-speed connection. It also enables users to connect to a domain controller using a reliable, high-speed connection.

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