- [Instructor] As we continue to explore the environments
where Windows servers may operate,
I want to show you one of the most common oversights
in Windows server administration.
Let's go ahead and open PowerShell, and take a look
at one of our system properties.
Specifically, what I want to look
at is the name of our Active Directory site.
Now clearly, this detail is buried fairly deep
within the system information of our machine.
It looks like it's probably significant,
so I'm going to go ahead and hit Enter and see what the name
of our Active Directory site is.
Well, it looks like it's named Default-First-Site-Name.
You aren't asked to set this value
while creating an Active Directory domain or forest,
so it's often skipped over, and that's unfortunate,
because it's not an easy thing to change
once the domain has already been populated
with computers, users and various other things.
As soon as you begin the creation
of an Active Directory forest,
it's time to name that first site.
Let me go ahead and close PowerShell.
In Server Manager, I'm going to go to the Tools menu,
and open Active Directory Sites and Services.
Here, you can assign a name to
that first site immediately after creating the forest,
before you join any other servers to the domain,
and definitely before you promote
any more domain controllers.
Let me right-click on that, and rename it.
The name you give is also significant.
It should be geographically significant.
I'm going to name this LACorp to designate
that this is our corporate data center
in Southern California near our Los Angeles headquarters.
The reason it's important to consider geography
when naming your sites, is that the primary purpose
of Active Directory Sites and Services is to set
up network paths to define the links between sites,
so it's a good idea to name your sites
for where they exist geographically.
Like I said, the primary function of Active Directory Sites
and Services is to establish traffic patterns
between your physical locations.
So, planning your sites starts
by defining physical locations on your wide area network.
A global chain of hotels might have a site
for each metropolitan area that they serve.
A smaller regional company might have sites
for each separate location, and a company
that works entirely out of one facility,
might only have one site, but it's
still a good idea to give it a name.
When you create multiple sites, the next thing you need
to do is establish link values, and these are numbers
that you can set based on speed, or bandwidth between sites.
This helps you define the preferred paths
that network traffic will travel,
from one end of the network to each other.
For example, in this scenario, if I needed
to get a packet from Canada to the U.K.,
I could take the slower, higher cost path of 400
to go direct, or, I could add 100 to 200,
I could send the package down to the U.S.,
and over to the U.K., it will get there faster,
and I can assign costs to the links to make sure
that that traffic follows the shorter path.
There are network applications like Exchange
that may add their own link values on top
of what's already there, but they can only do that
if the sites have already been named
and the links have been created.
In this case, we could find Exchange traffic always
following a different path than other network packets.
There is no restrictive limit on the number
of sites you create in a domain, or the number
of domains you create at one site.
These two are independent of each others.
It's all about defining portions
of your network for directing traffic.
Whether you're creating sites and link costs
to use better connection speeds, or possibly
to force all traffic through one central office,
take the time to name your first Active Directory site
as soon as you promote the first domain controller.
Then you can create additional sites as needed,
before adding new domain controllers,
so that they can be accurately placed
in the proper site from the beginning.