Hey all,
I am preparing to upgrade a client from Exchange 2003 to 2010 (yeah, here we go again).
In the past, most of the domains I have had to deal with are pretty straight forward affairs where the domain name is "domain" and the domain DNS suffix is some form of "domain.com". This client however is a law firm and has gone through a number of name changes over the years. As such, their DNS Domain Name is different than their NetBIOS domain name...which I know is not uncommon. The hang up is that I am getting confilcting answers as to whether or not this constitues a disjoint namespace and thus requires the special consideration needed for such a circumstance when configuring Exchange 2010.
When I run "set" I get the following AD info :
USERDNSDOMAIN=LOCAL.ABC.NET
USERDOMAIN=XYZ
Which per this article (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676377.aspx) would fall under scenario 3 and is an example of a disjoint namespace. Also, when I run the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer, it tells me that there is a NetBIOS and DNS name mismatch.
However, when I follow the instructions in this article (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998420(EXCHG.80).aspx) the values for bothNV Domain and Domain within the registry are the same: local.abc.net. Which would imply that there isn't a disjont namespace. Also, local.abc.net is the only DNS zone on all DNS Servers/DCs while all users log in using XYZ\username.
So which is it? Do we have a disjoint namespce here and if so do we need to configure AD and the Exchange 2010 infastructure to deal with it? And what implications, if any, are there if the current environment is left as is and Exchange 2010 is installed? (this is a 100% 2008 R2 domain)
Currently, the value for msDS-AllowedDNSSuffixes is empty but there are no DNS name resolution problems for this domain. All computers are able to resolve other AD computers via their NetBIOS/DNS COMPUTER name (which resolves to hostname.local.abc.net). Also, there are currently no problems with Exchange 2003 and it is working as expected (apart from being obsolete by 2012 standards :D).
Thank you in advance for your opinions,
-Matt