Rough Country Miles of Alaska (RCM) is a teardrop snowshoe manufacturer (worn by lumberjacks) that has contacted you to install Windows Server 2012 R2 and Active Directory. It owns the RoughCountryMiles.com domain name. It has 300 users, equally dispersed in three locations: Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks.
Anchorage is the headquarters, while the Fairbanks office handles the Northern Alaskan region, and the Juneau office is in charge of the Southern Alaskan region. The security policies, such as password length and account lockout, are more laidback in Juneau than in Fairbanks. The company headquarters establishes financial goals and general operations policy, but it allows some regional operational autonomy.
Within corporate headquarters are the following business units:
- Operations
- Manufacturing
- Executive
- Logistics
Within the two regional offices are the following business units:
- Sales
- Purchasing
- Management
- Inventory
- Finance
The chief information officer (CIO) would like to delegate the ability to manage users and groups to the business unit level, without delegating control over security policies.
The three locations are joined by communications lines that are 80% saturated from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Answer the following questions:
- How would you design the logical structure of Active Directory for the Rough Country Miles of Alaska, and what domain naming structure would you suggest?
- How many domain controllers, DNS servers, and global catalog servers would you suggest? Where would you place them? What is your reasoning?
- For the benefit of the upper management who are nontechnical, please describe how forest functional levels, trees, domains, OUs, and sites function in Active Directory.
- What edition of Windows 2012 R2 server would you use for your domain controller? If you needed a high-availability fault-tolerant clustering system for RCM's Web server, what edition of Windows Server 2012 R2 would you use?
- You will be building these servers. How would you select your server components? What would you do if you added a backup peripheral device to your server and the mouse froze?
Adhere to APA formatting and reference guidelines when writing your response. Additionally, your response should be free of grammatical errors, use complete sentences, and give specific details to support statements.