Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of visiting and working with a pretty large number of directory owners. Those I have visited typically have Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) and many have one or two additional directories and one or two had dozens. For customers that have multiple directories I would have thought I would see more virtual directory deployments, but rarely do I.
Virtual Directories attempt to provide a single view of an identity despite specific attribute data being in separate databases; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_directory. From reading with Wikipedia definition you would think everyone should have a virtual directory – so why don’t they? Virtual Directories do have challenges of their own since they introduce another rather complicated moving part into the environment.
I am always trying to better understand these environments so I started to think about why I don’t see virtual directories – When I ask customers and parts the answer is almost always the simple “it just doesn’t fit our needs.” This answer didn’t shed much light on what was going on and I decided to try and understand why they had multiple directories in the first place. I have found for main reasons for multi-directory deployments. I am sure there are more reasons out there, but these are the most common I run accross…
Stop back tomorrow for part 2.
I am very interested in this topic, and will read the rest, but stretching this over multiple days seems disingenuous. 3 paragraphs to whet our appetite for an IT article???
Sorry if it came off that way, no intention to be disingenuous… I just write slowly.