MegaCorp

MegaCorp

Introduction

MegaCorp is a rising star in the provisioning of cloud computing services. Its primary offerings are in the area of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and it is quickly gaining a very positive national presence in the IS industry. MegaCorp provides all the standard cloud IaaS offerings, including on-demand and long-term processing, storage, and virtual machine management systems. MegaCorp is now considering offering a variety of new services and has decided to set up dedicated business intelligence (BI) operation to provide assessments of the marketability and competitive capability of specific cloud services. Because MegaCorp believes the proper utilization of this BI system will provide significant competitive advantage, it is willing to equip it with the latest systems and services. The operation, to be known as the “Surf Shoppe”, will be housed in a separate facility on the main MegaCorp corporate campus. The Surf Shoppe will, however, receive all external information services from the main MegaCorp headquarter building. The building will house 20 employees, half of whom will be engaged in online research. One-half dozen employees will be charged with product development. There will also be two administrative support persons, a dedicated IT system administrator, and a project leader who will have space in the building. It is absolutely imperative that the Surf Shoppe operation remains a corporate secret, until such time as the CIO deems it wise to reveal it.

Discussion

Setting up Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory domain structure

We can configure the Server Core machine to provide different basic roles: Domain Services Active Directory (AD DS), AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services), DHCP server, DNS server, file server, print server, and Streaming Media Services.

The basic role of Active Directory has been renamed as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). Numerous new services were added, such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS - initially known as the Active Directory Application Mode or ADAM), Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), and Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). Services and Certificates of identity let administrators to run user accounts and digital certificates that help them to use certain systems and services.

A new mode of AD, known as “Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC)” appears, for utilization in places where the domain controllers can be accommodated in rooms with low access security. The RODC contains a non-editable copy of the directory Active Directory, and redirects all write attempts to a full domain controller, it also replicates all accounts except sensitive accounts. RODC mode, credentials are not cached by default. Furthermore, only the domain controller that hosts the PDC emulator role requires Windows Server 2008 local administrators can log on to the RODC to perform maintenance operations without needing administrative privileges domain. The service Active Directory can be rebooted; it can halt and reboot AD from the Management Console (MMC) or command line without rebooting the domain controller. This reduces downtime due to maintenance and reduces the prerequisite of the role of domain controller with Server ...