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YashyFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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You have a 2003 PDC and a 2008 secondary DC. What steps would you take to turn 2003 into 2008?

hi peeps,

If you've got a 2003 PDC, with a 2008 secondary DC, then what would be the smoothest, best approach to upgrading that primary DC into a 2008 PDC?

How would you go about it in a live production environment? Is there anything you would watch out for especially and be careful of whilst attempting this?

Thanks a lot
Yashy
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Krzysztof Pytko
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Firstly, thank you for the responses. Means a lot.

If we have a second site, located elsewhere that is part of our domain also and which are global catalog servers, then AD needs to replicate over the VPN right? So will any changes need to be made on the global catalog servers at the other end at all (they're on server 2008) once the FSMO role has been transferred from the 2003 to a 2008 server?
If you have promoted 2008 as DC then it by default is selected as GlobalCatalog and DNS server. When you don't change anything that you need to only wait for AD database replication between Sites.

FSMO roles are transferred transparently and they don't need time to replicate. When you click OK, FSMO role is on the specified DC in a second :)

However, before you will decommission the old DC run on one of your DCs (better on 2008 R2) in command-line

repadmin /syncall

to force AD database replication. Wait some time (depends on WAN lin between Sites; let's say 15-30 mins)

and then run

repadmin /showrepl /all /intersite /verbose

check if replication occurs without any errors

and as the last one

dcdiag /e /c /v

to see if there is no other forest/domain errors. After that you can start demoting old DC

Krzysztof
Once the FSMO role is transfers wait for replication.Check all the DC are GC.
Ran dcdiag /q to check for any errors.
To force the replication between the DC ran repadmin /syncall /AdeP
Ran repadmin /replsum to check the replication summary.
If the health of the DC are OK you can proceed with removal of old DC if required.
Note:Kindly take the backup of DC before you proceed with demotion.