Microsoft windows 2000 DNS manual Active Directory Storage and Replication Integration

•Incremental Zone Transfer (IXFR)

•Dynamic Update and Secure Dynamic Update

•Unicode Character Support

•Enhanced Domain Locator

•Enhanced Caching Resolver Service

•Enhanced DNS Manager

Active Directory Storage and Replication Integration

In addition to supporting a conventional way of maintaining and replicating DNS zone files, the implementation of DNS in Windows 2000 has the option of using the Active Directory services as the data storage and replication engine. This approach provides the following benefits:

•DNS replication will be performed by Active Directory service, so there is no need to support a separate replication topology for DNS servers.

•Active Directory service replication provides per-property replication granularity.

•Active Directory service replication is secure.

•A primary DNS server is eliminated as a single point of failure. Original DNS replication is single-master; it relies on a primary DNS server to update all the secondary servers. Unlike original DNS replication, Active Directory service replication is multi-master; an update can be made to any domain controller in it, and the change will be propagated to other domain controllers. In this way if DNS is integrated into Active Directory service the replication engine will always synchronize the DNS zone information.

Thus Active Directory service integration significantly simplifies the administration of a DNS namespace. At the same time standard zone transfer to other servers (non Windows 2000 DNS servers and previous versions of the Microsoft DNS servers) is still supported.

The Active Directory Service Storage Model

The Active Directory service is an object-oriented X.500-compliant database, which organizes resources available on your network in a hierarchical tree-like structure. This database is managed by the set of Domain Controllers (DC). The portion of the Active Directory service database for which a specific DC is authoritative is physically located on the same computer where the DC is. Every resource in Active Directory service is represented by an object. There are two distinct types of objects supported by Active Directory service:

•Containers–objects that can contain other container and leaf objects

•Leafs–objects representing a specific resource within the Active Directory service tree

Windows 2000 White Paper

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