[tpunx99GSX]

Originally Posted by Onefast99gsx

To answer your question, tpunx99gsx... No the Win2003 server won't be used as a PDC. It's used as a Patch Mgmt, Joomla Intranet & a few other smaller applicatons for our bank. The Win2008 that I will also be building will be the PDC. I will have to think what we will use for the BDC. I know you said it should be stand alone but our budget is so tight right now I'm lucky to even be doing 2 additional servers the way it is. My boss & upper mgmt will stick gobs of money into our AS/400 iseries system but when it comes to the PC file server network it's a whole different story. It sucks! Right now our Novell 6.5 server serves as a shitload of purposes. When it's done, that Netware server will go from 1 server to a span of 3 servers but in a Win2003 & 2008 mix so that's surely a step up.

For the most part, our network is pretty simple. Our PC's don't use any DHCP addressing. We use static IP's... and the DNS IP's to get to the internet are manually entered in the network configuration of the PC. This was how it was done before I got there. The PC's are currently in a Workgroup. Going to a Domain controller will be nice!

Question for you guys. Reverting back to partitioning. Is it best to keep the partitions as Basic drives or is best practice to convert them to Dynamic.

Thanks again.

On the PDC. If you plan on going with Windows 2008 i would def get Hyper V then create a virtual server for the applications, and a different one for the DC. That would work perfect and should fit within your budget. I know how the whole tight budget works, i think im over my IT budget by a lot this year. But oh well, we got alot for it, so it works out.
On Partitioning i have had some problems before with dynamic, but i am pretty sure it had to do with my home PC when i switched to linux. I would research the dynamic partitions before implementing it.
On the DHCP. Do you currently have a Domain Controller? Setting them all as static sounds like a managment nightmare. I use DHCP Pools that our users automatically pull from. It basically does the same thing that your static method does but it allows the server to control all of your addressing needs, and you can just set the users to Obtain automatically.