Round Robin for Secondary DNS?

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone uses round-robin DNS entries for their root site's
DNS servers and what their experience is with this design.

I have a number of sites that have local DCs also running DNS. In our root
site, there are four DCs also running DNS. While doing a routine inspection
of the remote site's configurations, I noticed that not all DHCP servers, and
not all member servers or DCs are using exactly the same secondary and
tertiary (sp?) DNS IPs in their networking parameters for secondary DNS
lookups. I was thinking that I could create a round-robin strategy for all
secondary DNS lookups, to help standardize the same IP that would be
specified for secondary lookups throughout the organization while
distributing the secondary lookup load at the same time.

On the other hand, we have yet to really optimize our standard DNS config by
removing the Internet's root servers and specifying our own root servers, or
by specifying forwarders to send Internet lookups to our ISP. We still have
some Windows 2000 DCs that we are trying to remove from our environment.
Once they are all gone we will have all DCs running Windows Server 2003 R2
SP2 and will be raising the forest and domain functionality levels as well.
Once we're a pure 2003 R2 environment we were going to look at DNS server
settings that we could capitalize on.

Any pros or cons to this round robin approach? Once we complete the move to
2003 R2 would the round robin idea be moot? I would like to hear what others
have done.

Cheers!

- SB

Nevermind - I spent so much time overthinking things that I can't see the
forest for the trees. I completely forgot that round robin will only work
with names... (sigh) I need more coffee...

Cheers everyone,

- SB

"SB" wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I was wondering if anyone uses round-robin DNS entries for their root site's
> DNS servers and what their experience is with this design.
>
> I have a number of sites that have local DCs also running DNS. In our root
> site, there are four DCs also running DNS. While doing a routine inspection
> of the remote site's configurations, I noticed that not all DHCP servers, and
> not all member servers or DCs are using exactly the same secondary and
> tertiary (sp?) DNS IPs in their networking parameters for secondary DNS
> lookups. I was thinking that I could create a round-robin strategy for all
> secondary DNS lookups, to help standardize the same IP that would be
> specified for secondary lookups throughout the organization while
> distributing the secondary lookup load at the same time.
>
> On the other hand, we have yet to really optimize our standard DNS config by
> removing the Internet's root servers and specifying our own root servers, or
> by specifying forwarders to send Internet lookups to our ISP. We still have
> some Windows 2000 DCs that we are trying to remove from our environment.
> Once they are all gone we will have all DCs running Windows Server 2003 R2
> SP2 and will be raising the forest and domain functionality levels as well.
> Once we're a pure 2003 R2 environment we were going to look at DNS server
> settings that we could capitalize on.
>
> Any pros or cons to this round robin approach? Once we complete the move to
> 2003 R2 would the round robin idea be moot? I would like to hear what others
> have done.
>
> Cheers!
>
> - SB