Good day, Cloud Gurus, and welcome back.
In this lesson, we're going to take a look
at deploying domain controllers on-premises.
Let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
First up, we'll ask the question,
why should we deploy multiple domain controllers?
And then we'll take a look at how you can deploy
a new domain controller.
And then finally, we'll do 2 demos.
In the first demo,
we'll deploy an additional domain controller.
And in the second demo,
we'll install Active Directory Domain Services
from installation media.
All right, let's get started.
So far we've just had one domain controller
in each of the domains we've deployed.
So why would we have more than one domain controller?
Well, the first and most obvious reason
is to provide high availability.
If you have multiple domain controllers
and configure them both as a DNS server
and configure your clients to use both DNS servers,
then should one of your domain controllers fail
or any of the services
that Active Directory Domain Services depends on fail,
then your users will still be able
to locate the domain controller and log on.
And the second reason is performance.
Domain controllers perform authentication
and apply settings to users and computers.
The time it takes to log on
or to apply the configuration depends
not only on the performance of the domain controller,
but the performance of the network connectivity
to the domain controller.
If you have multiple regional locations
it makes sense to place a domain controller
closer to your users,
so that the time taken to interact with a domain controller
during log on or applying settings is reduced.
It also means,
that should the link between your 2 offices fail,
your users will still be able to log on.
Okay, let's have a look at the process
of deploying a new domain controller.
The first step is really a requirement.
You need to log on as a Domain Admin or an Enterprise Admin.
And then you should configure the server
using those initial configuration steps
we spoke about earlier in the course.
You should configure the server name and network settings,
including static IP addresses and DNS configuration.
And then you should domain join the server.
Now technically, this is optional,
but it does verify that your domain controller
is able to communicate with Active Directory
and it allows you to manage the server
using a domain account,
and it also applies any security settings
that might be applicable to servers in domain.
The fourth step is to install
the Active Directory Domain Services role.
And we've gone through this process before.
And then finally, you promote the server
to a domain controller.
And then the database will replicate
and the server will reboot.
Now, if you have a very slow network connection
or a very large Active Directory database,
this process can take some time.
So we'll take a look at how you can install
a new domain controller using the install from media option
in a demo later in this lesson.
Now you might be thinking, this is pretty basic stuff.
Why have I gone through the process
of spelling it out like this?
Well, these days, Microsoft likes to test
to see if you know the required steps
and the order of the required steps
on the certification exams.
So it's important to know the prerequisites,
and those order of steps are important for you to know
for the certification exam.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of installing an additional domain controller.
In this demo,
we're going to deploy an additional domain controller
to our Brisbane office.
We already have our first domain controller.
And in this demo, we're going to deploy DC02. We're
going to do it a little bit differently this time around.
Like all good domain controllers, DC02 has been deployed
using the Server Core installation option.
So we're going to use a combination of SConfig
and Server Manager on the ADM01 server
to install and configure the domain controller.
Let's take a look.
All right, so here we are on CORP-BNE-DC02.
Firstly, we're just going to verify
that the network configuration on DC02 is correct
so that we can promote it
to an additional domain controller.
We'll start by stepping through the network settings.
So we're just going to select option 8.
All right, first, we need to select the network adapter
that we're going to use.
We're just going to use the first network adapter.
And here we can see
that the server has a static IPv4 address assigned
and we can see that the preferred DNS server
is set to DC01, which is 10.1.1.5.
All right, with our network settings correct,
we can exit out of here.
Let's go ahead and domain join this computer now.
So we're going to select option 1.
And we're going to select to join a domain using option D.
We'll type the name of the domain.
And then we'll specify the user account to join the domain.
And then I'll just type in the password.
It'll go ahead and join the domain.
And then it's just going to ask us if we want to change
the name of the computer before restarting.
We know the name of this server is already correct
so we're going to select no,
and then we'll proceed with the restart.
And then we'll jump over to ADM01
and we'll complete the process of promoting the server
to a domain controller.
All right, so here we are on ADM01.
We're going to go ahead and use Server Manager
to promote that server as a domain controller.
So we'll just go up to All Servers
and then we'll go Manage and then Add Servers.
Now we can use Active Directory to find the servers.
So we're going to go ahead and enter in the start of the
name for this server, and then we'll select Find Now.
And we want to add DC02,
so we'll go ahead and add that server.
And then we can select OK.
It'll just take a moment to pull that server.
All right, now we can go ahead and add roles and features
to the server remotely using Server Manager.
So we'll just head and right-click on DC02
and then we'll go Add Roles and Features.
We'll select Next.
And then I'll just go through the process
of adding the Active Directory Domain Services role.
And we've seen this a few times now
so I'll speed this process up.
This will just take a moment to complete
and we'll come back when this is done.
All right,
with the Active Directory Domain Services role added,
we can now go ahead and promote this server
to an additional domain controller.
So we'll ahead and select to promote the server.
And we're adding a domain controller to an existing domain.
We're going to provide the domain admin credentials.
We can go ahead and select Next.
For high availability, we're
also going to make this domain controller a DNS server.
We'll go ahead and provide
the directory services restore mode password,
and then we'll go ahead and select Next.
And we don't need to update the DNS delegation
so we'll just go ahead and select Next.
And here we can pick which domain controller
we want to replicate from.
We only have one domain controller
in our domain at the moment,
so we're going to go ahead and select Next.
We'll select the default Active Directory database location.
And then we'll just take a look
at the PowerShell script that you can use
to automate this process.
And we can see that the cmdlet
to add an additional domain controller
is Install-ADDSDomainController.
And there's the parameters that we provided
through the wizard.
So we can go ahead and close this.
And then we can go ahead and complete the install.
This will just take a moment to install.
So we'll come back when this is done.
All right, DC02 has now been successfully promoted
to an additional domain controller,
so we can go ahead and close the wizard
and then we can select Close again.
And we can see with the installation complete
and DC02 has gone and restarted in the background,
the Active Directory Domain Services node has showed up
in Server Manager.
All right, that wraps up this demo.
Let's go and take a look at the next demo.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of installing active virtual domain services
from installation media.
We already have our Brisbane office deployed
with 2 domain controllers,
and now the company has opened an office in Perth
and we've connected the 2 networks
via our wide area network.
And now we want to deploy a new domain controller
in our Perth office.
The problem is, the link between our Brisbane
and our Perth office is slow and unreliable.
In this lesson,
we're going to deploy the new domain controller
in the Perth office using install from media,
which allows us to transfer
the Active Directory database offline to the new office
using something like an encrypted external hard drive.
It's important to know that to create installation media
for Active Directory Domain Services,
you need to log on interactively
to an existing domain controller.
You can't complete the process from another server,
like your administrative server or your workstation.
So we're going to go ahead and log onto
an existing domain controller.
We'll use DC01 for that.
And then we'll copy the media over
to the new domain controller
and promote the server to a domain controller
using the installation media.
Let's take a look at that process.
All right, so here we are logged onto DC01
and we're just going to use the ntdsutil
command-line utility to create installation media
for Active Directory Domain Services.
Let's get started.
First, we'll run the ntdsutil command,
and then at the ntdsutil prompt
we need to activate the Active Directory database
as the instance that we want to work with.
So we'll run the activate instance ntds command.
And now we're going to use the ifm command
to specify that we want to create installation media.
Now we're going to go ahead and create the installation
media and a full copy of the system volume
on the domain controller
using the create sysvol full command
and specify the directory
where we want to store the installation media.
And we'll cover the system volume,
more commonly refer to as sysvol, in an upcoming lesson
where we take a look at Active Directory replication.
All right, with that installation media now created,
we now need to copy that media
over to our new domain controller.
So we'll go ahead and do that
and we'll come back when that's done.
All right, so we've now got that installation media
copied over to our new domain controller,
and I've gone ahead and installed
the Active Directory Domain Services role
on the new domain controller.
And as we've been through the process a few times now,
I've gone ahead and ran
the Active Directory Domain Services configuration wizard,
right up until the point where we have the option
to install from media.
So let's go ahead and select that option.
And then we'll go ahead and browse out for the media.
And then we can select OK.
And we can choose to verify the media if we want to.
The remainder of the steps
are much like installing a regular domain controller,
but you can see in the PowerShell script
that there is one additional parameter specified
and that's the InstallationMediaPath parameter.
All right, let's go ahead and close that.
And then we'll complete the promotion
of this domain controller.
This will just take a moment to complete.
So we'll go ahead and speed this process up
and we'll come back when it's done.
All right,
with the installation of that domain controller now complete
let's go ahead and wrap up with a bit of a summary
of what we've covered in this lesson.
So what have we covered?
It's important to be aware
that you should deploy multiple domain controllers
to improve the performance
and the availability of Active Directory Domain Services.
It's also important to know
that membership of Domain Admins
or the Enterprise Admins group
is required to promote a domain controller
in an existing forest.
And you can use install from media
to reduce replication traffic
when deploying a domain controller at a new branch office.
And it's also important to remember
that to create installation media,
you must log on interactively to a domain controller,
and you can use the command line utility, ntdsutil,
to create the media.
All right, that concludes this lesson.
Thanks for being with me and I hope you found this useful.
And I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.