How many users can be implemented in a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory?

I was wondering how many users can be supported in a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory? I called Microsoft and they did not know even know.

The number of users that AD can support is dependent on the amount of space that each object takes up, which will increase if you're using many directory-enabled applications such as Microsoft Exchange that will increase the amount of storage required for each user object. The physical NTDS.DIT file that stores AD information on each domain controller can be many terabytes in size, and thus AD can scale to millions of objects. For an interesting discussion on what happens when you have a really large DIT file, check out this blog entry from one of Microsoft's developers:

This was first published in July 2006

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