Administering Domain Controllers

Domain controllers (DCs) host the directory service and perform the services that support identity and access management in an enterprise running Microsoft Windows. So far in this training kit, you have learned to support the logical and management components of an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) infrastructure: users, groups, computers, and Group Policy. Each of these components is contained in the directory database and in SYSVOL on domain controllers. In this tutorial, you begin your exploration of the service-level components of Active Directory, starting with the domain controllers themselves. You learn how to add Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controllers to a forest or domain, how to prepare a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 forest or domain for its first Windows Server 2008 R2 DC, how to manage the roles performed by DCs, and how to migrate the replication of SYSVOL from the File Replication Service (FRS) used in earlier versions of Windows to the Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R) mechanism that provides more robust and manageable replications.