Active Directory Domain Service installation prerequisites

Before we look into Active Directory Domain Service (AD DS) service installation, there are certain prerequisites which need to be fulfilled. Without these, even if we have a good design, we would still not be able to achieve the core objectives.

Hardware requirements

In modern infrastructures, most of the workloads are running as virtualized environments. Active Directory Domain Services also can deploy in virtualized platforms, but there are certain scenarios where physical domain controllers should be used. In such situations for AD DS 2016, following are the minimum hardware requirements:

• 1.4 GHz 64-bit processor
• 2 GB RAM
• Storage adapter which supports PCI Express architecture (Windows Server 2016 does not support IDE/ATA/PATA/EIDE for boot and data)
• 32 GB of free space
• 1 x network adapter
• DVD drive or support for network, USB boot

Note

This is the minimum requirement to install the AD DS 2016 service; it doesn't mean it can accommodate...