The most common failures outside of hardware or network issues are in relation to objects wrongly created or deleted in the Active Directory store.

In a fully provisioned solution environment, the Active Directory store contains a number of object types that are referenced by the provisioning system. These objects must only be created and manipulated by the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS). Each object has a corresponding unique GUID that may be referenced by related components. Recreating the object will result in a new object with the same name but a different GUID. This may result in orphaned objects, unresolved references, and anomalous reports. It follows that if you accidentally remove objects from the Active Directory store that were created during provisioning operations (or those objects become otherwise corrupted or inaccessible), although the platform may continue to operate, further provisioning operations may fail.

The following table shows the provisioned objects in the Active Directory store.

Table: Provisioned Objects in the Active Directory store

Object	Created by
The Hosting Organizational Unit and all OUs that are children of it.	Initialization, organization creation
Security groups in each organization.	Organization creation
User accounts in the hosted organizations.	User creation
_Private containers in each hosted OU	Organization creation
Public stores	Exchange provisioning
Mail stores	Exchange provisioning
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services database	Windows SharePoint Services provisioning
Offline Address Book (OAB) servers	Exchange provisioning
The Services container within the _Private container contains pointers to provisioned services: Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft SQL Server, Customer Directory Integration (CDI), DNS, and Web Services	MPS operations for Windows SharePoint Services, CDI, DNS, Web Service