Using PowerShell to Transfer FSMO Roles

BrianM — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:00:00 GMT

You may be familiar with the traditional ways to transfer FSMO roles but how about by using PowerShell? By now you should just know that PowerShell can do everything the GUI can do…well at least that is the way it feels to me.

If you want to use PowerShell to transfer any of your five FSMO roles (PDC Emulater, RID Master, Infrastructure Master, Domain Naming Master and Schema Master) then you will first need to import the Active Directory Module into PowerShell.

ipmo activedirectory

Now that you have the AD module loaded the cmdlet you will use for this is quite large - Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole. Thankfully we have the Get-help cmdlet to help us remember that. All I need to do is remember move-ad and then I press tab to complete the rest. There is only one other cmdlet that is similar to it and you just have to remember you are trying to move the FSMO role and not the sever.

When entering the cmdlet you need to specify the operation master roles to move. the syntax for the five roles are as follows - PDCEmulator, RIDMaster, InfrastructureMaster, SchemaMaster, or DomainNamingMaster. To specify more than one role just separate each role with a comma.

An example of me moving the RID Master and PDC Emulater to DC2 is as follows:

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity "DC2" -OperationMasterRole RIDMaster,PDCEmulator

A feature that I just love in PowerShell is the –WhatIf parameter. By adding this to your code it will do a dry run and let you know what is going to change if you did the command without that parameter.

One key thing to note here is that I am NOT seizing the FSMO role. For that you will need to use NTDSUtil as defined here.

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Using PowerShell to Transfer FSMO Roles