Restructing Active Directory Forest with Exchange 2010

Hi Everyone,

Here is the scenario. We have recently acquired a company and need to bring them into our environment. Currently we have a two-way trust to this company. But Because the possibility exists we will be acquiring more companies in the future, we have been thinking of designing a new forest under which we can create new domains and migrate our current domain into a new domain that falls under this new forest. This would provide us more flexibility for future acquisitions - but would it offer enough to justify the effort involved?

The issues I see immediately apparent are the following. We currently have exchange 2010 supporting 600 users in this domain and we have over 300 linux servers along with around 400 windows servers along with our 600 users that would need to be migrated. First of all I am unsure of the impact this kind of change would incur for our linux servers and secondly, how I would migrate the exchange environment to support this re-created domain but also to possibly be setup in such a way that it could host other domains in the future should we undertake more acquisitions and decide to host those companies in our environment?

Any help or guidance on such a scenario would be great. I should add, I am familiar with ADMT having used it years ago, but not sure how I would handle exchange 2010 and linux servers that are joined to our domain, or how the transition would occur.