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• Incremental Zone Transfer (IXFR)
• Dynamic Update and Secure Dynamic Update
• Unicode Character Support
• Enhanced Domain Locator
• Enhanced Caching Resolver Service
• Enhanced DNS Manager
Active Directory Storage and Replication Integration
In addition to supporting a conventional way of maintaining and replicating DNS
zone files, the implementation of DNS in Windows 2000 has the option of using the
Active Directory services as the data storage and replication engine. This approach
provides the following benefits:
• DNS replication will be performed by Active Directory service, so there is no
need to support a separate replication topology for DNS servers.
• Active Directory service replication provides per-property replication granularity.
• Active Directory service replication is secure.
• A primary DNS server is eliminated as a single point of failure. Original DNS
replication is single-master; it relies on a primary DNS server to update all the
secondary servers. Unlike original DNS replication, Active Directory service
replication is multi-master; an update can be made to any domain controller in
it, and the change will be propagated to other domain controllers. In this way if
DNS is integrated into Active Directory service the replication engine will
always synchronize the DNS zone information.
Thus Active Directory service integration significantly simplifies the administration of
a DNS namespace. At the same time standard zone transfer to other servers (non
Windows 2000 DNS servers and previous versions of the Microsoft DNS servers) is
still supported.
The Active Directory Service Storage Model
The Active Directory service is an object-oriented X.500-compliant database, which
organizes resources available on your network in a hierarchical tree-like structure.
This database is managed by the set of Domain Controllers (DC). The portion of the
Active Directory service database for which a specific DC is authoritative is
physically located on the same computer where the DC is. Every resource in Active
Directory service is represented by an object. There are two distinct types of objects
supported by Active Directory service:
• Containers–objects that can contain other container and leaf objects
• Leafs–objects representing a specific resource within the Active Directory
service tree
Windows 2000 White Paper
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