If you only take a quick look, you won’t see the Active Directory for the trees. Although it may sound like a bad pun, it’s actually true, because the overall structure of AD is also called the forest and can contain several trees in the form of root domains and subdomains of a DNS space. Containers organized into domains are considered the lowest unit. Joined domains map the organizational structure and resources of the enterprise, but can also be configured independently of physical and logical enterprise structures. In this way, several locations can be united in one domain or different domains can be managed at one location.
Information that can be accessed by all AD users is
- the schema,
- the configuration
- and domain information in the global catalog.
Domain-specific data, on the other hand, can only be accessed via the internal domain controllers already mentioned. A domain usually has two controllers, which prevent data loss through multimaster replication, i.e. backup controllers and AD copies.