2 seperate DC's or 2 domains in a forest?

[ArizonaGeek]

We are wanting to split off our users from our production network. I understand having two different domain controllers (well, 4 in our case) would be ideal but the reality is that we have blown our budget for this year and it might be end of Q1 or begining of Q2 before we can buy new servers.

But we have an immediate need to seperate our domains as we are putting in seperate T1 lines to seperate the traffic. So I am looking for the plus and minus of setting up a new domain in our forest. It would be on a different network (10.10.10.0 versus 10.10.0.0) with all traffic going thru our firewall. Could we set up a trust between the two (if needed) if we added a another domain to our forest?

Thanks for the help!
Rob

 

[supportahm1980]

Yes you could join them later on but not sure why you would want to do that.

Another thing you can do is create a new subnet and limit routing to only that subnet (hence not effect your production enviroment) You could use VMWARE or microsoft virtual server to setup a domain controller) no need to buy additional hardware.