Large OU Restructure

Hi Guru's

We have a large OU restructure coming up.

Our AD is a single domain with reasonably good network links between our DC's.

The OU's we want to restructure have approx 2000 objects each.

The OU restructure does not involve adding or deleting any of the existing
objects and only involves a restructuring of the OU tree itself.

The queries I have are as follows.

1. Are there any gotchas of right clicking an OU with 2000 objects in it and
choosing to move it to a new part of an OU tree. (Or should a smaller number
of objects within the OU be moved instead)

2. What actually happens when we restructure the OU. If we move an OU with
2000 objects should we epxect that 2000 objects have to replicate between all
the domain controllers to reflect the OU tree restructure ? (Or is it simply
the OU tree structure that gets replicated since we are not adding or
deleting any AD objects)

3. We intend to use repadmin and replmon to monitor the AD replication
during this process. Are there any other good tools from Microsoft that you
could recommend we could also use to monitor AD replication.


Thanks a million to all in advance.

Dan

Howdie!

On 17.05.2010 11:06, Desparate Dan wrote:
> 1. Are there any gotchas of right clicking an OU with 2000 objects in it and
> choosing to move it to a new part of an OU tree. (Or should a smaller number
> of objects within the OU be moved instead)

There shouldn't be any gotchas there. The number of objects should not
affect the success/performance of the restructuring. 2000 objects isn't
that much that replication or huge traffic happens.

> 2. What actually happens when we restructure the OU. If we move an OU with
> 2000 objects should we epxect that 2000 objects have to replicate between all
> the domain controllers to reflect the OU tree restructure ? (Or is it simply
> the OU tree structure that gets replicated since we are not adding or
> deleting any AD objects)

From a DB perspective, there happen a couple of things - not only the
moved OU's "parent container" needs to be adjusted but all child
object's anchester "attributes" need adjustment, too. So I'd expect both
OU and child objects to be touched and replicated, too.

> 3. We intend to use repadmin and replmon to monitor the AD replication
> during this process. Are there any other good tools from Microsoft that you
> could recommend we could also use to monitor AD replication.

Those are good for rep monitoring. If you wish, you should probably
measure the actual traffic that's flowing between the DCs using some
monitoring tool - but I doubt you'll need that.

Keep Group Policy and the scope of application in mind. Make sure you
catch all changes and their impact on GP application and the end result
on clients in mind.

Cheers,
Florian