When users are on a WAN and access to certain data basies is slow. can the adding extra global catalog servers and site links between sites make much of a difference.

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I believe you can only have one GC. As the problem is only traffic for databases, you should look for the bottleneck there. Log the performance and then check it with your baseline. Have a look and see if you have a hardware fault (if one of your RAID disks is faulty, this will affect performance). Look for the simple things first and then go deeper.

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You can have as many GCs as you want. It is recommended that you have at least one per site. This way logon requests do not traverse a WAN link. In native mode, a GC is required for logging onto the domain. However domain admins can complete the logon process with no GC. You are right muzza, when searching for certain attributes over a WAN link, the process can be slow. So to get around this you place one at each site.

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Without knowing the whole topology and infrastructure its hard to say.Generally I would say Yes.GC`s and Sites optimize processes.You can have multiple GC`s in fact its a good idea for redundacy as well as to speed logons,service lookups..etc.

As was mentioned I would be looking at the Network first.

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By nature the first domain controller of ever domain will become the GC, as each domain has a GC in Common..this is the default. However for performance reasons you can assign additional DCs the roll of GC. Having a GC in each site allows the clients to locally find objects in other domains as that is what a Global Catalog server does, stores partial replicas off all objects in Active Directory, however if you make changes such as add new user accounts or modifiy the schema, you will suffer the consequence of the replication time for the GCs to synchronize whith each other so they are consistant, that means while this happens, the slow WAN link can become bogged. Hopes this helps. yes of course if your GC in your site went down, then you would have to traverse slow wan links when you want to find objects. GCs are used in Native mode domains, only for Universal Group types as that is where they are stored. To logon in to other domains you must have a GC present.

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I work for a company that runs the IT support for roughly 90 small comapnies. we place a GC at each client office for the reasons stated in the above replies, but if your refering to slow databases that are not part of active directory and the replicated with it(such as an accounting application). Your best bet is to have the remote offices access this through a terminal server. the nice thing tha M$ did with licensing the cals for Terminal services is that a cal is included in each copy of W2K Pro, so as long as the users are connecting from a W2K Pro system and you have a server with W2K server on it you won't need any other licenses. One last piece of advice, don't place the applications that users will terminal into on the GC, having users run apps on the DC/GC can be a scary thing.

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Thats some really great stuff you all have given me. I'll do my best to remeber all that.

Chers people
Till next time

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