Remote sites?

arwes

How do you guys go about setting up remote sites? Before I started here, my employer bought another company in the state capital and basically kept everything the same. They still have their Win2K DC and domain, and they're connected to us with a site to site VPN using MikroTik routers, and on a different subnet.

Now we bought another company and I'm thinking we need to reorganize all this. Boss wants to get rid of the Win2K server (and I agree). I guess we should set both of the sites up with a DC that's configured to be an additional DC for a existing domain, and set up replication to both remote sites. I'm sure there's a lot of other things that will have to be considered but does this sound like I'm on the right path?

Danny_1983

Cisco box at either end running site to site VPN's with a leased line connecting each site into your server...If you now own that new company shouldnt they be logging onto your network?

arwes

Well, I'm locked into MikroTik products as far as routing goes. Can't convince my CTO otherwise since he hasn't had any problems with them. And yes, I want them all to log onto our network.

Kaminsky

Look at the potential traffic between the sites and that will help you go forward. Site to site vpns of the estimated bandwidth/resiliance and redundancy and you have one doman (the site to site stuff will be invisible pretty much). The traffic analysis and choice of provider is where you will save the money or pay over the top for unused bandwidth. Either way, your boss is going to be putting their hands deep into his pocket.

Find out what the boss actually would like, including bandwith and 24 hour availability and cost it up with the various carriers. The look at how to save some money with different types of lines and packages, etc and show the boss these cheeper options too.

The boss may even decide to forget the whole networking up of the seperate businesses altogether and keep them autonomous.