Hello,
I've taken over a mess of a migration project, the goal of which is two take two offices working in their own domains, create a third domain and migrate them all into that one. There are, however, two major problems with this plan:
* The two offices have the same netbios name for their domains
* The new domain was created as a child domain of one of the offices
So we have:
companyltd.london
companyltd.berlin
and the newly created, mostly migrated to, company.local.
Domain controllers for company.local exist in both sites and AD replication and mail is flowing happily between the sites. There is a trust between companyltd.london (parent) and company.local (child). (When I say parent and child, I mean that the _msdcs folder in the company.london DNS contains all the GUIDs of the domain controllers for company.local)
The problem is that since there is already a trust between companyltd.london and its child domain company.local I cannot create a second trust between companyltd.berlin and company.local, as the netbios names for london and berlin are the same (companyltd).
If companyltd.london and company.local were in fact separate forests I'd simply break the trust after resource migration and create a new one with companyltd.berlin. As far as I can tell I have two choices:
* Perform a manual migration of the berlin office
or
* re-promote the child domain, then break the trust between it (company.local) and companyltd.london
I would like the community's opinion on which of these two options is less painful and less risky. I see manual migration as being both painful and risky: each workstation must be done manually, I'm not sure if the user profiles will be preserved, we have to do every workstation in a single weekend (which is hard because of permanently remote users) and there is no easy rollback strategy.
Repromotion of a child domain is, on the other hand, a complete unkown for me. What do you guys think?
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
Thank you for such a quick response.
OK, so 'repromotion' is actually reinstallation - that's off my list of posibilities. Have you ever actually renamed a domain before? Every time I hear about it people wince and say 'it's not as easy as it sounds' I need to know the real world risks so I can weigh them up against the manual migration.
From the link you provided:
http://technet.microsoft.c
"it is not designed to accommodate forest mergers or moving domains between forests."
I'm not sure if that's what I'm doing or not - just putting it out there for comment.
Sorry, never needed in AD environment. Ages ago in NT environment have done it with third party tool.
You should read the documents(Understanding How Domain Rename Works and Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing Domain Rename) which are found from
http://technet.microsoft.c
here is good article of domain rename at
http://www.petri.co.il/win
You can't promote a child domain to a new forest. AD provides no facilities to do this. In short you have to create a new forest and migrate the users using tools like ADMT http://www.microsoft.com/d
I have two production domains with the same netbios name and a new production domain that is a child of one of the first domains. I'm not sure I understand the response - there I can't just create a new domain, the goal of the project is to have a single domain and have the comapny's resources are already in it.
the question is: What is less time consuming and risky? Renaming a domain and creating a trust so i can use ADMT, or manually migrating 50 users, their mailboxes and their applications over a weekend?
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: masa77Posted on 2008-04-30 at 00:02:59ID: 21468616
You could first rename the domains for simplifie the migration
http://technet.microsoft.c
Then you could process on migration
http://technet2.microsoft.
When you "re-promote" remove AD from the source domain and join back to new forest, you will lose all AD settings from the source domain, users and etc.