Windows Server – Locating, Transferring, and Seizing FSMO Roles

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‘.

FSMO Roles : Solution

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

[box]netdom query fsmo[/box]

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

[box]Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity LAN-2016 -OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,  DomainNamingMaster, PDCEmulator, RIDMaster, InfrastructureMaster
[/box]

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

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.

[box]Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity LAN-2016 -OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,  DomainNamingMaster, PDCEmulator, RIDMaster, InfrastructureMaster -Force
[/box]

Note: If you prefer to do this graphically, then see the following article.

Transferring Your FSMO Roles

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA

5 thoughts on “Windows Server – Locating, Transferring, and Seizing FSMO Roles

  1. 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. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *