Hi,I am in process to built a Domain Controller using Windows 2008. Is any Best practice guide from Microsoft for Hardware or prerequisite. Please help. I need guidlines to built my DC as follows:1. HW Raid 1 with two drives and one logical drive. 2. Partition C: only OS 3. Partition D: \SYSVOL \NTDS \Backup 4. Partition E: \SYSLOG \Transaction Log \AD-Snapshot

HelloHere is a link for hardware reqhttp://www.serverintellect.com/support/windowsserver2008/2008-hardware-requirements.aspxYou will need to configure your RAID 1 using your manufacturer guidelinesAt installation, partition drives to C, D, E respectivelyDuring promotion to active directory, follow prompts and specify your locations as neededIsaac Oben MCITP:EA, MCSE

Not sure about best practice, but the Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 document states:We recommend that the Active Directory database folder be located on a physical volume that is separate from the Active Directory log file folder. In the Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services installation wizard, these are known as data files and data recovery files. Both folders should be on a physical volume that is separate from the operating system volume. The use of drives that support command queuing, especially SCSI or Serial Attached SCSI, might also improve performance. I would generally recommend a 4 disk RAID 10 configuration instead because it makes the best use of IOPS. Having said that, I've also seen a 2 disk RAID 1 configuration in place in many smaller organisations.You might want to give some thought your snapshots. I see you have "AD-Snapshots" listed for Partition E. This won't work if you want to schedule with Windows Server Backup because you need dedicated disk to achieve this. If you were thinking of AD read-only snapshots with NTDSUTIL then you don't get to specify the target disk - it simply uses the area of disk reserved for shadow copies on the volume hosting the AD files.Tony

If you use a 4 disk raid 10 for active directory in server 2008 how would you partition the virtual raid disk, or does it matter? Would you install active directory and log files on separte partitions from the OS? thanks