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)

Chapter 3: Managing Active Directory Roles and Features

Creating domain controllers is fun but leveraging all of them is key to implementing a responsive and highly available Active Directory. Therefore, we'll focus on the differences between domain controllers in terms of Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) roles and global catalog configuration. There's a reason why the following quote, inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm, is popular among Active Directory admins:

"All domain controllers are equal, but some domain controllers are more equal than others."

The following recipes are covered in this chapter:

  • Querying FSMO role placement
  • Transferring FSMO roles
  • Seizing FSMO roles
  • Configuring the Primary Domain Controller emulator to synchronize time with a reliable source
  • Managing time synchronization for virtual domain controllers
  • Managing global catalogs

Before we begin with the recipes, we will look at FSMO...