Active Directory Sites

Sites represent the physical topology of your Active Directory infrastructure based on subnets of TCP/IP addresses, and allow for replication, redundancy and load balancing across your Active Directory deployment. By defining sites in Active Directory, you effectively tell Active Directory what your underlying physical network looks like. This allows domain controllers to utilize the underlying network in the most efficient manner possible and allows Active Directory to conserve bandwidth that is required for other applications within your organization. However, sites are not related to the structure of the domain, nor must they maintain the same namespace—a site may span multiple domains and, conversely, a domain may span multiple sites. While no formal relationship exists between a site and a domain, a site may be given the same boundaries as a domain.

To ensure rapid and reliable network communication, Active Directory offers methods of regulating intersubnet, or intersite, traffic. The Active Directory physical structure governs when and how replication takes place. As users log on to the network, they are able to reach the closest domain controller site through the previous assignment of subnet information. The system administrator uses the Active Directory Sites and Services snap-in to manage the topology of replication services.

Vintela Single Sign-on for Java supports replication and failover using Active Directory sites.