###BeginCaseStudy###
Topic 5, Alpine Ski
Overview
Alpine Ski House provides vacation travel accommodations. Its main office is in Vancouver. Alpine Ski House
also has branch offices in Montreal, Denver, and New York.
An additional sales office is located in Los Angeles. This office has client devices only.
All servers in each office run Windows Server 2012 R2. All client devices in each office run Windows 8.1.
Alpine Ski House plans to acquire another company named Margie’s Travel. Margies Travel has an AD DS
domain named margiestravel.com.
Danner and New York
The Denver and New York offices have their own child domain named us.alpineskihouse.com. The domain
controllers are displayed in the following table:
Vancouver and Montreal
Alpine Ski House has an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) domain named aplineskihouse.com for the
Vancouver and Montreal offices. The forest and domain functional levels are set to Windows Server 2008.
The domain controllers in the domain contain Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers and DNS
servers. The domain controllers are displayed in the following table:
The Vancouver office also has a certification authority (CA) installed on a server named ALP-CA01.
Business Requirements
Growth
An additional branch office is planned in an extremely remote, mountainous location that does not have
traditional access to the Internet.
The remote branch office location will use a high-latency, low-bandwidth satellite connection to the Denver
and Vancouver offices.
The Los Angeles office will be expanded to include sales and billing staff. The Los Angeles location will not
contain IT staff.
File Management
Currently, each office has a dedicated file share that is hosted on a domain controller. The company plans to
implement a new file sharing capability to synchronize data between offices and to maximize performance
for locating files that are saved in a different branch office. Sales users in the Los Angeles office must also be
able to retrieve file data from each branch office.
Recovery time objective
The business requires that the data stored in AD DS must be recovered within an hour. This data includes
user accounts, computer accounts, groups, and other objects. Any customized attributes must also be
recovered. The current backup solution uses a tape drive, which requires a minimum of two hours between
notification and recovery.Office 365
Alpine Ski House purchased Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses for all users in the organization.
Technical Requirements
Existing environment
Users in the Montreal office of Alpine Ski House report slow times to log on to their devices. An
administrator determines that users in the Montreal location occasionally authenticate to a domain
controller with an IP address of 172.16.0.10/24. All authentication requests must first be attempted in the
same location as the client device that is being authenticated.
Growth
The remote branch office must have a single domain controller named REMOTEDC01.us.aplineskihouse.com.
The replication between domains must either use best-effort or low-cost replication. After the expansion,
authentication must occur locally.
Any server placed in the Los Angeles office must not contain cached passwords.
File management
Where possible, the new file management solution must be centralized. If supported, the data must be
stored in a single location in each branch office.
Acquisition
After acquiring Margie’s Travel, all AD DS objects, including user account passwords, must be a migrated to
the alpineskihouse.com domain. Alpine Ski House plans to use the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) to
complete the migration process.
The password complexity requirements for the margiestravel.com domain are unknown. Users should not be
forced to change their passwords after migrating their user accounts. Some computer objects will be
renamed during the migration.
Office 365
Alpine Ski House must use Microsoft Azure to facilitate directory synchronization (DirSync) with Office 365.
The DirSync utility must be installed on a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure.
###EndCaseStudy###
DRAG DROP
You need to design the file management solution.
What should you do? To answer, drag the appropriate technology to the correct office. Each technology may
be used once, more than once, or not at all. You may need to drag the split bar between panes or scroll to
view content.
Answer: 
I don’t understand the answer at all. Can anyone explain it for me? Thanks.
Agree with answer.
Reasoning:
Client wants to optimize data sync / sharing throughout domain.
New york: Hosted mode, as this will create a central location for caching data frequently used at this site in addition to allowing other connected / branch offices pull from it as well speeding up the sharing of data.
Denver: DFS, as this location is close in proximity to LA and connected to remote office via link.
Montreal: Distributed mode. This is most likely an office with less than 100 users since it is a ‘branch’ office and close to New York and the HQ. (Honestly I am reaching on this one since it is supported to have multiple ‘Hosted’ caches within a domain as long as you have the server infrastructure for it.)
LA: Direct access, since they don’t have any servers at that location it makes sense that DA would be used so that they are always connected to the domain. This is more secure than setting up a site vpn without any IT staff onsite to manage it.
Montreal: I am betting would have DFS and hosted cache.
Notes on Branch Cache: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831696(v=ws.11).aspx
___
IMO this proposed solution blows. Why not Branch Cache in the cloud?
I don’t think your explanation is right. First of all there is not statement about connections between each office. They only thing we know is except the new additional office, all the other offices have Internet. So:
1. New York and Denver are in the same domain us.alpineskihouse.com. They both have servers reside in. So either way, they should use the same tech. Hosted mode branchcache or DFS-R. How can they use different ones?
2. Montreal has servers reside in. Hosted mode branch cache or DFS-R should be used. After all the questions states that “Where possible, the new file management solution must be centralized. If supported, the data must be stored in a single location in each branch office.” So Distributed BranchCache is definitely wrong.
3. The question doesn’t tell if the computers in Los Angeles office are joined to a domain, and which domain they are in. If they are in domain, then there must be some sort of remote access tech implemented. Given that, why DirectAccess?
4. Is there any trust between us.aplineskihouse.com and aplineskihouse.com? Because if not, BranchCache can be ruled out.
So, WTF?
The question says “Each technology may be used once, more than once, or not at all” so it’s ok to reuse answers.
The case study says nothing about links between offices except for the satellite link for the new remote office. But I think it’s safe to assume there are some, either wan links or site-to-site vpns. So I think DirectAccess must be wrong, it’s for an individual computer to connect across the internet to the corporate network. LA has either a GPO or an RODC depending on your preferred answer to “You need to plan the expansion of the Los Angeles office” so its computers must be in one of the domains.
I think this statement implies some use of domain DFS and DFSR “The company plans to implement a new file sharing capability to synchronize data between offices and to maximize performance for locating files that are saved in a different branch office”.
The requirement “Sales users in the Los Angeles office must also be able to retrieve file data from each branch office” doesn’t say anything, both alpineskihouse domains are in the same forest so there’s a trust.
The requirement “If supported, the data must be stored in a single location in each branch office” rules out branchcache distributed mode, I think LA needs an RODC so every office has a server and can use branchcache hosted mode.
The requirement “Where possible, the new file management solution must be centralized” sounds like files should be in Vancouver, the main office if possible. So I thought: use DFSR to replicate to one other site for redundancy, and branchcache hosted mode for the others. The requirement “The replication between domains must either use best-effort or low-cost replication” suggests minimal traffic between domains is a requirement, so DFSR to Montreal which is in the same domain as Vancouver. Hosted mode for the others.
Crap question.
I totally agree with your explanation。
The first three are DFSR, the last one is BranchCache Distributed Mode, as there are not servers there.
I think that DFSR should be on all 4