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

 

2 Comments

  1. Kashef

    Can this Powershell be run for target DC in the event the current FSMO DC server is down due to a disaster ?

    Nice article nevertheless.

    Thank You.

    Reply
    1. Martin (Post author)

      Thanks for writing 😉

      It’s a little complicated, but it can be done, try searching for “seize fsmo roles” on Google 😉

      Reply

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