The Active Directory deployment process in the infrastructure has been made easy over the years. Even if you do not have advanced knowledge of Active Directory, with a few wizards, you can install AD DS on a server. I've written articles on my blog with step-by-step guides on how to install each and every version of Active Directory, and lots of people still follow those to do the installations. But will a clean installation of Active Directory in your environment make it a good design too? Let's figure it out.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Designing a forest structure
• Designing a domain structure
• Designing an OU structure
• Designing the physical topology of Active Directory
• Global catalog server placement