To understand the structure of Group Policy, you first need to understand the structure of Active Directory^®. Active Directory has both physical and logical components. The heart of Active Directory’s physical architecture is an extensible storage engine (ESE) for reading and writing information to the Active Directory data store. The ESE uses an object-based hierarchy to represent information in the data store. The data store is essentially a database with a primary data file, working files for maintaining the state of the data file, and transaction logs for recording changes. Within Group Policy, there is a logical and physical representation of every Group Policy object (GPO) as well. The logical component of a GPO is a Group Policy container (GPC), which is stored in Active Directory. The physical component is a Group Policy template (GPT), which is stored on the file systems of domain controllers. The way these logical and physical components are handled depends largely on the Group Policy processing configuration.

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