Active Directory FSMO role placement

Question

Hello Experts,

We have five domain controllers in HQ site listed as below:

DC1

DC2

DC3

DC4

and two domain controllers in the DR site.

All FSMO roles are placement on DC1.

What's the best practice to distribute the roles.?

Thanks

Answer 1

Not necessarily. In a single domain forest your size, there are no meaningful downside to having all FSMO roles on the same DC. There is an argument of splitting them to provide more resiliency, but tbh. considering that you can transfer/seize roles if needed, this argument seems a bit contrived. The primary considerations revolve around making sure that PDC Emulator has access to an external time source (but this should apply to other DCs as well considering that you might want to transfer this role to others at some point). Also note that the Infrastructure Master role becomes irrelevant (all DCs should be Global Catalogs)

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hth

Marcin

Answer 2

Hello Ahmed Essam,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

Here is a document about detailed FSMO placement, you can read it.

FSMO placement and optimization on Active Directory domain controllers

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/active-directory/fsmo-placement-and-optimization-on-ad-dcs

I hope the information above is helpful.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

Best Regards,

Daisy Zhou

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