You're reading from Mastering Active Directory, Third Edition - Third Edition

Product type Book

Published in Nov 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801070393

Pages 780 pages

Edition 3rd Edition

Languages

Concepts

Networking

Author (1):

Dishan Francis

Table of Contents (22) Chapters

Preface

1. Active Directory Fundamentals

2. Active Directory Domain Services 2022

3. Designing an Active Directory Infrastructure

4. Active Directory Domain Name System

5. Placing Operations Master Roles

6. Migrating to Active Directory 2022

7. Managing Active Directory Objects

8. Managing Users, Groups, and Devices

9. Designing the OU Structure

10. Managing Group Policies

11. Active Directory Services – Part 01

12. Active Directory Services – Part 02

13. Active Directory Certificate Services

14. Active Directory Federation Services

15. Active Directory Rights Management Services

16. Active Directory Security Best Practices

17. Advanced AD Management with PowerShell

18. Hybrid Identity

19. Active Directory Audit and Monitoring

20. Other Books You May Enjoy

21. Index

Designing the OU Structure

The local library in my town has a collection of nearly 10,000 books. These books cover many different subjects. When I walk into the library, I can see that there are signs hanging from the ceiling that help to identify the different library aisles that belong to different book categories such as novels, history, arts, technology, and cooking. So, if I know the type of book I am looking for, I can easily go to the relevant aisle. Each of these aisles has multiple bookshelves. These bookshelves are further categorized into subcategories. At the top of each bookshelf, there is a sign describing which subcategory it belongs to. As an example, the History section has bookshelves with categories such as History of Europe, History of Asia, World History, and so on. This makes book selection even easier—telling me exactly which bookshelves to look for. When I go to a bookshelf, the books are usually organized in alphabetical order. Each book has a small...

OUs in operations

In Chapter 3, Designing an Active Directory Infrastructure, we learned how we can represent an organization's logical structure based on domains. But this hierarchical design has border boundaries. Therefore, we do not consider object class requirements. OUs help us to define the hierarchical structure for objects within the domain boundaries.

There are three main reasons for creating an OU:

Organizing objects
Delegating control
Applying group policies

Let's go ahead and look into each of these points in detail.

Organizing objects

An Active Directory domain controller supports holding nearly two billion objects. As the number of objects increases in the Active Directory environment, the effort we need to put in to manage them also increases. If we have a proper structure to group these objects into smaller groups, then we have more control over them and we know at a glance where we can find a specific object...

Containers vs. OUs

When you open the Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) Microsoft Management Console (MMC) with the advanced view, there will be pre-setup folders.

But not all of these are OUs. They are mostly containers:

Figure 9.3: Containers and OUs

The only default OU in the AD environment is the Domain Controllers OU. All other folders in the tree are containers. Containers can also contain objects. The Computers and Users containers are good examples of that. By default, any computer object will be stored in the Computers container. All of the default user accounts and security groups are stored in the Users container. Similar to OUs, containers can also be used to delegate administrative control. The only difference between containers and OUs is that group policies cannot apply to containers. Group policies can be assigned only to OUs. The system also does not allow you to create new containers other than the containers that are created by the system...

Active Directory Groups vs. OUs

Active Directory Groups and OUs have certain similarities. Both can be used to group objects together. Both can be used with Group policies. But there are a number of differences between the two.

...

OU design models

In this section, we are going to look into different OU design models. This doesn't mean you need to stick to one of these. Modern infrastructure requirements are complex and challenging. These models will guide you to create a design that suits your organization's requirements.

The container model

In the Containers vs. OUs section, I mentioned default containers in an Active Directory environment. One of the characteristics of these default containers is that they have large administrative boundaries. As an example, the Computers container will contain any computers added to AD by default. It can be a physical server, virtual server, desktop computer, or laptop. The container model is based on a similar concept. This is mainly suited for small businesses where you have limited administrative and security requirements with Active Directory objects.

When OU boundaries are large, it is not possible to apply tailored group policies or precise delegated...

Managing the OU structure

Similar to any other Active Directory object, the OU structure can be managed using Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC), ADUC MMC, and PowerShell. In this section, I am going to demonstrate how to manage the OU structure using PowerShell.

Let's start this with a new OU. We can use the New-ADOrganizationalUnit cmdlet to create a new OU. The complete syntax can be reviewed using the following command:

Get-Command New-ADOrganizationalUnit -Syntax

As the first step, I am going to create a new OU called Asia to represent the Asia branch:

New-ADOrganizationalUnit -Name "Asia" -Description "Asia Branch"

In the preceding command, -Description defines the description for the new OU. When there is no path defined, it will create the OU under the root. We can review the details of the new OU using the following command:

Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -Identity "OU=Asia,DC=rebeladmin,DC=com"

We can...

Summary

OUs play a crucial role in Active Directory by allowing engineers to create a hierarchical structure within domain boundaries. This hierarchical structure should be created considering object management, delegating control, and applying group policies to manage applications, services, and security settings. In this chapter, we learned why OU design is important and what needs to be considered when designing the OU structure. After that, we moved on to different OU models that can be used as guidelines to design OU structures. At the end of the chapter, we learned how to manage OUs in the Active Directory infrastructure and how to delegate control for OUs.

In the next chapter, we will look at group policies, which are one of the core features of Active Directory.

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Authors (1)

Dishan Francis

Dishan Francis is an IT professional with over 15 years of experience. He was a six-time Microsoft MVP in enterprise mobility before he joined Microsoft UK as a security consultant. He has maintained the RebelAdmin technology blog over the years, with lots of useful articles that focus on on-premises Active Directory services and Azure Active Directory. He has also written for other Microsoft-managed blogs such as canitpro and ITopsTalk. When it comes to managing innovative identity infrastructure solutions to improve system stability, efficiency, and security, his level of knowledge and experience places him among the very best in the field.

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Feature	Active Directory Groups	OUs
Hierarchical Structure	A flat structure. A group can have different object types (users, devices, groups) as members but can't present them in hierarchical order.	Can use different models to arrange OUs in hierarchical order. Also, can change the structure easily whenever required.
Object placement	One object can be part of many different groups.