I have a win 2008 r2 AD server that acts as the primary DNS for all clients on the network. I'm having some issues with the response times when resolving external domains and would like to add another DNS server to my network. The second DNS server would be running on windows web server edition so cannot support the active directory role. Simply setting the new DNS server as the secondary DNS for clients seems to balls up domain services for them. How is it possible to achieve this?
Many Thanks
Best Answer
You need the domain server to be configured as a replication slave to the primary one. If you don't do that, clients might randomly try to resolve using it only to find that it does not have the domain records.
The other thing you could do is have it configured to forward all requests for domain-local DNS data to the domain server, but enable caching.
60 users should be a trivial load. You may want to have a look at how the DNS server is resolving the names; if it is forwarding queries to a slow DNS server, this would be an issue. Either have the domain server resolve them on its own without forwarding (using the root hints and recursing), or configure a faster forwarder.