Active Directory: Move FSMO roles with PowerShell

When moving FSMO roles the old fashioned way, you use MMC and move the roles each individually, it takes a little time, but it’s somewhat troublesome.

BUT, this can be achieved much quicker with Powershell 🙂

Here is how to transfer all 5 FSMO roles:

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity DC01 –OperationMasterRole PDCEmulator,RIDMaster,InfrastructureMaster,SchemaMaster,DomainNamingMaster

Where “DC01” above is the TARGET DC.

Check with netdom command afterwards:

Done!

It’s best practice to have two DC’s and then it’s advisable to split the FSMO between theesew two:

Place the following roles on a DC01:

RID Master;
Infrastructure Master;
PDC Emulator.

Place the forest roles on a DC02:

Schema Master;
Domain Master.

So on DC02 run:

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity DC02 –OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,DomainNamingMaster

So things look like this:

 

Link: Flexible Single-Master Operation (FSMO) placement and optimization on AD DCs – Windows Server | Microsoft Docs