After my last column, I received several questions about planning for the number and size of the domain controllers you need when performing domain consolidation in Windows 2000. Windows NT 4.0 domains, with their limited number of directory objects and object attributes, are relatively straightforward. In Active Directory (AD), however, we have much more flexibility in deciding what types of objects to create and how much detail we will store as attributes for those objects. And increasingly, we'll have more AD-integrated applications, which will affect AD size and performance.

For...