Sherrill Medical Group of California is a HMO that has contacted you to install Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. They have 2000 users equally dispersed in three locations: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Sacramento is the headquarters, while the San Francisco office handles Northern California region, and the Los Angeles office is in charge of the Southern California region. The security policies, such as password length and account lockout are more laid back in San Francisco than in LA. The company headquarters establishes financial goals and general claims policy, but allows some regional operational autonomy.

Within corporate headquarters are the following business units: Operations, Claims, Physician Relations, and IT. Within the two regional offices are the following business units: Sales, Marketing, IT, Claims, and Physician Relations.

The CIO would like the 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 T1 lines that are 80% saturated from 8 AM to 5 PM.

Answer the following questions:

For the benefit of upper management that is non-technical, please describe how forests, trees, domains, OUs and sites function in Active Directory.

How would you design the logical structure of Active Directory for the Sherrill Medical Group 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?

What edition of Windows 2003 server would you use for your domain controller? If you needed four way clustering for Sherrill's Web server, what edition of Windows Server 2003 would you use?

You will be building these servers. How would you select your server components? What would you do if you added a tape backup to your server and the mouse froze?