Windows Server – Locating, Transferring, and Seizing FSMO Roles

KB ID 0001257 

Problem

I’ve written about transferring and sizing FSMO roles, (Flexible Single Master Operations) before, see the following article;

Transferring Your FSMO Roles

Now you have a PowerShell Commandlet to help ‘Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole‘.

Solution

As before you can view your FSMO role holders, by using the following command.

netdom query fsmo

Locate FSMO Roles PowerShell

To transfer them to another server, (in the case a host called LAN-2016.

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity LAN-2016 -OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,  DomainNamingMaster, PDCEmulator, RIDMaster, InfrastructureMaster

If you can’t be bothered to type the names, you can also use numbers, i.e.

  • PDCEmulator 0
  • RIDMaster 1
  • InfrastructureMaster 2
  • SchemaMaster 3
  • DomainNamingMaster 4

2016 Move FSMO Roles PowerShell

Obviously this will move them all, omit any you don’t want to move!

How to Seize FSMO Roles In Server 2016

Easy! Same command as above, but you put the ‘-Force’ switch on the end of the command, i.e.

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity LAN-2016 -OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,  DomainNamingMaster, PDCEmulator, RIDMaster, InfrastructureMaster -Force

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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Author: PeteLong

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5 Comments

  1. Perfect! Saved me time. Thanks for the post.

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  2. Very clean procedure… thank you

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  3. Worth noting that as in Pete’s screenshot, you’ll need to run an elevated PowerShell session for this to work. Otherwise you’ll get an Access Denied message. 🙂

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  4. Nice and easy. Worked out for me. Thanks you!

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