Understanding Active Directory, Domain Controller and Domain.

Or, Logical Difference between Active Directory and Domain?

Or, Logical Difference between Active Directory and Domain Controller?

Descriptions: Some time its little confusing to differentiate between domain, domain controller and active directory. It is because, all these terms are used knowingly or unknowingly to describe other related concepts.

To make it simple, I would say…. Domain is a logical boundary with some name like xyz.com, abc.net etc… managed by Active Directory services which contains all the objects and database information and these entries, database, objects and logical boundaries are installed or configured on a server, which is known as Domain Controller.

Let’s see the below examples:

Active Directory: Active Directory is a directory service that stores information of all AD objects like users, computers and OU etc…  NTDS and SYSVOL are some important database directories, which are used by active directory to store all information.

Domain: Domain is a logical boundary of your active directory environment, which gives a single/multiple name interface to access your active directory database information. It works under a common name, database and policy...

Example: My domain name:- xyz.com and xyz.abc.com have unique logical name but running from same AD database with domain and sub-domain logical boundary of domain concepts.

Domain Controller: The server, which hold the Active Directory service installed in it, known as Domain controller server.

Example: You have a server having nothing installed its just a server. Once you installed Active Directory services on this server, it becomes Domain Controller server.

Cheers, please write me back if you have any query or feedback on this.