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Overview
Alcatel-Lucent | Integration of VitalQIP® with Microsoft Windows 2003 Networking/Active Directory
Active Directory and Windows 2003 networking
In Windows 2000 and Windows 2003, the old proprietary WINS technology of Windows
NT was replaced with the use of DNS and RFC-2136-compliant Dynamic DNS Updates.
Microsoft's design made extensive use of a resource record type called "SRV" to allow
network clients to find the hostnames of critical network servers. In Microsoft's design,
DNS data may be stored and synchronized using LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol) technology, in a distributed database known as Active Directory. Sometimes,
the term "Active Directory" (AD) is used more broadly, but not quite correctly, to refer to
the entire Windows 2003 network structure instead of just the database itself.
SRV records and special underscore domains
A central part of Windows 2003 networking is that Domain Controllers (DCs) need to
"advertise" services by putting SRV records into DNS. SRV records are a resource re-
cord type to associate a service name with a server's hostname. Windows 2003 clients
perform queries of these to find out which servers offer particular network services. For
example, Windows 2003 Domain Controllers provide LDAP and Kerberos services for
clients to use, so the SRV records for LDAP and Kerberos tell the names of the available
DCs. SRV records were defined in the DNS standards documents long ago, but little
used before Windows 2000. SRV records need to get into DNS quickly – not by manual
entry to the VitalQIP GUI – and they need to propagate to all other DNS servers quickly.
Microsoft networking uses special child domains such as "_ldap._tcp.domain", and so
on. These include:
_msdcs for the MS Domain Controllers
•
_sites for AD Sites to indicate closely connected subnets
•
_tcp for SRV records of network services that run on TCP such as LDAP,
•
Kerberos, and global catalogs
_udp for SRV records of network services that run on UDP
•
Operating system considerations
The choice of operating system should depend on your organization's level of knowledge
and support for that OS. Be aware that the OS of the VitalQIP Enterprise server does not
need to match that of the VitalQIP Remote servers or clients; VitalQIP customers often
"mix-and-match" operating systems. You do not need to run VitalQIP on Windows 2003
just because it will manage a Windows 2003 deployment.
Benefits of adding VitalQIP to an existing Microsoft infrastructure
VitalQIP provides additional functionality to that available from Microsoft tools. VitalQIP is
an IP management tool, not a directory service.
VitalQIP provides the ability to:
Manage your IP Address space holistically
•
Manage networks centrally or in a distributed fashion
•
Manage subnets and IP addresses
•
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