Redundant Domain Controller & DNS

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Michael Bui
    Twitter

Overview

In this lab we'll be configuring a second domain controller on SVR02 to provide redundancy for Active Directory & DNS in our domain.

Instructions

  1. Join the machine to the domain you want to set up redundancy on
  2. Add the Active Directory Domain Services Role
  3. Promote Server to a domain controller
  4. Add the domain controller to an existing domain. Our domain lab.builab.ca
  5. Specify the domain controller capabilities. We're not making this DC read only. Read only domain controllers can not be written to, they can only receive info from other DC's.
  6. Specify which DC to replicate from. We're replicating from SVR01
  7. Finish up installation wizard & restart machine

Validation

Upon restarting the machine we check to see if Active Directory & DNS records have been replicated over to SVR02

  1. In ADDS, my OU of BuiLab is replicated over to SVR02 with the users inside
  2. Clicking on the Domain Controllers OU we can now see that SVR01 & SVR02 are listed
  3. Our DNS forward and reverse lookup zones were replicated over from SVR01