Makecert Windows Server 2012 R2 Free To Leave

If the only Domain Controller goes down in the organization, big outages will occur resulting in a loss of operations.

To avoid this single point of failure you need to have a secondary Domain Controller.

A second DC will load balance the services and minimize the risk of critical services going down.

In this article, I will walk through the steps to add a second Domain Controller in a Windows Server 2012 R2 domain.

You will get a pop up to add features that are required for Active Directory Domain Services, click Add Features and then click Next.

You can have the server reboot automatically if needed by selecting the box Restart the destination server automatically if required.

Back in Server Manager you will see a yellow triangle at the top right that needs to be clicked.

In the message details click Promote this server to a domain controller.

Enter the existing domain name, or select it from the domain field.

You will get prompted for administrative credentials.

Click Next.

The Default First Site name should be selected for the site name unless you have created a new one.

This is common. The wizard is trying to contact the nameservers for the domain I entered winadpro.com and is unable to create a delegation for the sub-domain ad.winadpro.com.

This message can be ignored if you dont need computers from outside of the network to be able to resolve names within your domain.

In my environment, I want it to be able to replicate from any domain controller.

The replication depends on how you installed the first DC and where it is located.

If the DCs are all in the same site, then replicate from any will work.

If you have multiple sites, then you would have a different replication strategy.

For my organization, we have 4 domain controllers all in the same site, so I have set them up to replicate from any.

You should get a green check that all checks passed successfully.

If you want to verify your install and health of the Domain Controller run dcdiag v from the command line.

You can also go into Administrative Tools, Active Directory Sites and Services and verify the new Domain Controller is listed under your site.

The benefit to this is it will load balance the services and minimize the risk of a complete network outage.

Makecert Windows Server 2012 R2 Free To Leave

Feel free to leave your comments or questions in the comment section.

Makecert.Exe Windows Server 2012 R2