Active Directory Trees Forests - Exercise

This exercise is worth a total of 5 points. To receive full credit, you will need to outline in a short paragraph your plan for an Active Directory namespace appropriate for the situation described. Once you have come up with your solution, you will submit it.

The Active Directory namespace is the naming scheme that provides the hierarchical domain structure used by the DNS database. In this exercise, you will be asked to plan an Active Directory namespace for an enterprise network, taking into account the existing network structure and need for administrative boundaries. Your company, Acme Corporation, has merged with another large company, the Zilch Company. Acme and Zilch wish to maintain their separate company identities and each wishes to use its existing registered domain name on the Windows 2000 network (acme.com and zilch.net). Management also desires that Acme Corporation's two largest departments, Administration and Operations, have complete administrative control over their network resources. Members of all domains should have access to resources in all other domains for which they have permissions. You should not need to form any explicit trusts to accomplish this.

Based on the situation described above, you should prepare an outline that details how you would structure the Windows 2000 Active Directory namespace for the new enterprise. As you draft your outline, you will need to answer the following questions:

1. How many domain trees you will create?
2. Will you create a forest? If so, what kind of trust relationship will the trees and forest have?
3. What parent and child domains will you create?
4. What will be the domain names?
5. What tree will each domain belong to?