We have 4 sites, two in the same city, two elsewhere. Each site will be fully autonomous but there will be occasional VPN links to allow AD replication as our users float around the sites. Everything should be replicated.
I would like to use a topology using the site's city as the child domain. So for instance we would have:
- dc-site1.sydney.mycompany.lan
- dc-site2.sydney.mycompany.lan
- dc-site3.melbourne.mycompany.lan
- dc-site4.perth.mycompany.lan
My question really is with regards to the parent domain in a new forest. In a new set-up I can't create a child domain. So my DC is dc-site1.mycompany.lan. This doesn't really make sense in the above topology as it implies the DC is orphaned. We don't have a HQ as such.
I could, in one site, have two DCs: the parent and the child, but would this be confusing? Any machine should always join a child domain so the parent has no responsibility, other than perhaps replication.
Can anyone advise how this would work? Can the parent and child hapily co-exist on the same subnet?