Today's lesson covers how to create an Active Directory domain and join a member server to it. This week's topic takes a slightly different turn from the normally IIS related topics, but this is key video to help setup either a test or production environment that requires Active Directory.

Part of being a web administrator is understanding the servers and how they interact with each other. This week’s lesson takes a different path than usual and covers how to create an Active Directory domain and how to join a member computer to that domain. In less than 13 minutes we complete the entire process, end to end. An understanding of Active Directory is useful, whether it’s simply to setup a test lab, or to learn more so that you can manage a production domain environment.

This week starts a mini-series on web farms. Today’s lesson is on setting up a domain which is a necessary prerequisite for next week which will be on Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R), a useful technology for web farms. Upcoming lessons will cover shared configuration, Application Request Routing (ARR), and more.

Additionally, this video introduces us to Vaasnet (www.vaasnet.com), a service that allows the web pro to gain immediate access to an entire lab environment for situations such as these.

This is week 26 (the middle week!) of a 52 week series for the Web Pro. Past and future videos can be found here: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/LearnIIS7/

You can find this week’s video here.