Best Practices Analyzer for Active Directory Domain Services

Updated: August 31, 2012

Applies To: Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012

In Windows management, best practices are guidelines that are considered the ideal way—under normal circumstances and as defined by experts—to configure a server. While best practice violations, even critical ones, do not necessarily lead to problems, they indicate server configurations that can result in poor performance, poor reliability, unexpected conflicts, increased security risks, or other potential issues.

Topics in this section can help you bring Active Directory® Domain Services (AD DS) into compliance with best practices. Content in this section is most valuable to administrators who have completed a Best Practices Analyzer scan of AD DS and who want information about how to interpret and resolve scan results that identify areas of AD DS that are not compliant with best practices.

For more information about Best Practices Analyzer and scans, see Best Practices Analyzer (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122786).

More information about AD DS

AD DS provides a distributed database that stores and manages information about network resources and application-specific data from directory-enabled applications. Administrators can use AD DS to organize elements of a network, such as users, computers, and other devices, into a hierarchical containment structure. The hierarchical containment structure includes the Active Directory forest, domains in the forest, and organizational units (OUs) in each domain. A server that is running AD DS is called a domain controller.

For more information about AD DS, see Active Directory Domain Services Overview.