Proper way to remove a turned off Domain Controller ?

Question

Hi,

The domain controller (Running Windows 2012R2) & other MS Windows Servers in a particular small site has been turned off for a couple of months.

We are going to decommission all servers in that site.

We would like to ask the proper way of removing that Domain Controller. Can we just delete it or we should demote it first ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Normally you would remove active directory domain services which you can still do assuming it has not tombstoned. Another method, if its no longer available, is to simply do metadata cleanup to remove it from active directory.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/deploy/ad-ds-metadata-cleanup

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Answer 2

Yes, that should work. The other option is to simply do metadata cleanup to remove it from active directory.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/deploy/ad-ds-metadata-cleanup

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Answer 3

The simpler method is to perform metadata cleanup.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/deploy/ad-ds-metadata-cleanup
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/itops-talk-blog/step-by-step-manually-removing-a-domain-controller-server/ba-p/280564

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