Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Sander Berkouwer
Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Sander Berkouwer

Overview of this book

Updated to the Windows Server 2022, this second edition covers effective recipes for Active Directory administration that will help you leverage AD's capabilities for automating network, security, and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. Starting with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas, and partitions, this book will help you manage domain controllers, organizational units, and default containers. You'll then explore Active Directory sites management as well as identify and solve replication problems. As you progress, you'll work through recipes that show you how to manage your AD domains as well as user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships, and Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. Once you've covered DNS and certificates, you'll work with Group Policy and then focus on federation and security before advancing to Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premise Active Directory with Azure AD. Finally, you'll discover how Microsoft Azure AD Connect synchronization works and how to harden Azure AD. By the end of this AD book, you’ll be able to make the most of Active Directory and Azure AD Connect.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Using adprep.exe to prepare for new Active Directory functionality

The Active Directory schema defines the way that objects can be created, and what attributes are required or are optional for these objects. With previous versions of Windows Server, the base schema has been improved and extended.

Many features require certain schema versions for Active Directory. For instance, when you want to deploy a Windows Server 2016-based Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) farm, you'll need the Windows Server 2016 schema or a higher version of the schema.

Since Windows Server 2012, Microsoft updates the Active Directory schema automatically when you promote the first Windows Server 2012-based member server to an Active Directory domain controller.

However, consider what will happen if you want to do any of the following:

  • Update the Active Directory schema only, because your organization doesn't want domain controllers running the latest version.
  • Delegate...