Promoting a domain joined server to a secondary DC

[woreilly]

I am a small team of people tasked with researching and documenting disaster recovery standards for our other technicians. I have a school which are a good candidate to be a guinea pig for this. They currently have one DC which is running 2008R2 to approximately 200 x64 Windows 7 clients. They have 2 domain joined servers, both running 2008R2, which run Sophos Enterprise Console & WSUS and another which used to be their local PCE server. They are now centrally hosted for PCE so I thought about promoting that server to a secondary DC as part of my team's research.

 

I am wondering if I need to remove the PCE server from the domain before promoting it or can I DCPROMO it straight after installing the AD role?

[Norphy]

You can run DCPROMO as soon as you add the Active Directory Domain Services role. You don't need to disjoin the server from the domain before you promote it.

[woreilly]

You can run DCPROMO as soon as you add the Active Directory Domain Services role. You don't need to disjoin the server from the domain before you promote it.

 

I'm glad to hear it. Am I best to rename the server to something more meaningful BEFORE I do the DCPROMO?

[Norphy]

Hell yes. Renaming DCs is an exercise in pain and frustration.

 

/edit

 

IIRC, DCPROMO has been depreciated in Windows 2012 onwards. I think that you promote servers to DCs inside Server Manager now.

 

Regardless, this is a technicality, everything else I've said stands.

Edited March 11, 2015 by Norphy

[woreilly]

Hell yes. Renaming DCs is an exercise in pain and frustration.

 

/edit

 

IIRC, DCPROMO has been depreciated in Windows 2012 onwards. I think that you promote servers to DCs inside Server Manager now.

 

 

Regardless, this is a technicality, everything else I've said stands.

 

It is a 2008R2 server I will be promoting, however, I've never actually DCPROMO'd a 2008 or R2 server. Only ever worked on new 2012 or 2012R2 servers