Changing the Site Topology After Deployment

A forest site topology is very flexible and easily changed after your initial deployment. As your physical network evolves, remember to evaluate and tune your site topology. As changes to your network increase or decrease bandwidth or reliability, remember to create or remove sites and site links, and be sure to tune site link parameters to balance replication latency against bandwidth usage.

Before making a change to your site topology, anticipate the impact of the change on availability, replication latency and replication bandwidth, and how that might affect end users. Because site topology is stored in the Configuration container, changes will replicate to every domain controller in the forest. Frequent changes to the site topology will cause a large amount of replication traffic, so changes should be rolled up into fewer, larger changes instead of many, smaller changes. Depending on your replication topology and schedule, site topology changes can take a long time to reach every domain controller in the forest.