Creating a new child domain

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Creating a new child domain

Create a new child domain when you want to create a domain that shares a contiguous namespace with one or more domains. This means that the name of the new domain contains the full name of the parent domain. For example, sales.microsoft.com would be a child domain of microsoft.com. As a best practice, you create new domains as children of the forest root domain.

You can create a new child domain by creating a new domain under a parent domain using the Active Directory Installation Wizard. For information about how to create a new child domain, see Create a new child domain.

After you create the child domain, you can create additional domain controllers in the child domain for fault tolerance and high availability of Active Directory. For more information, see Creating an additional domain controller.