Domain Design: Single Forest, Single Domain, and Star Shaped

Note

A domain is not a security boundary within a forest. By default, all domains have transitive trust relationships within a forest and are therefore visible to each other. On top of that, all Global Catalogs contain the Security database and a rogue administrator can potentially gain access to different domains or even the entire forest. Please see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-001.mspx for more details on such vulnerability. Even though this particular vulnerability no longer exists within Windows 2003, something causing similar effects can be a possibility.

This is the most common design version for small-and medium-size businesses, that have offices within one country or that are geographically close. It involves a single hub site and several small sites. A hub site is defined as a big data center where the majority of your infrastructure is housed. So if you have the headquarters and development...