Windows Tip Sheet
Automate Conversion of Your DCs Into GCs
Speed up DC deployment with a simple GC script.
I was recently helping a client deploy domain controllers (DCs)
in about three dozen new offices (frequent flier miles, here I come).
Because each office would eventually house about six hundred employees
and because the company uses Exchange Server 2003, it seemed sensible
to add two or three domain controllers to each office and ensure
at least one of them was a Global Catalog (GC) server. To save time—we’re
talking a total of 75 new DCs—we worked up an automated installations
script to install the domain controllers.
After deploying DCs in two offices, we realized that none of the
DCs we were installing had been made into GC servers. Of course,
we realized this because users were going across the WAN for address
book lookups and were raising heck about the poor performance of
their e-mail clients! We quickly designated a GC in each location
but wanted to fix the problem in our deployment technique.
We were using a Dcpromo answer file to handle the domain controller
promotion process, and a little research turned up the answer: We
simply needed to add the line ConfirmGC = Yes
to the answer file for the DCs that would be GC servers. Seemed
like a nice simple tip for speeding up DC deployment, so I thought
I’d share it!
| Cool
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|
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More Resources:
- Read more about automating DCpromo here.
- Learn to combine unattended Setup and unattended DCpromo here.
- The official word on the subject of unattended DC promotion
can be found here.
About the Author
Don Jones has more than a decade of professional experience in the IT industry. He's the author of more than 30 IT books, including Windows PowerShell: TFM; VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed; Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI; and many more. He's a top-rated and in-demand speaker at conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and TechMentor, and writes the monthly Windows PowerShell column for Microsoft TechNet Magazine. Don is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award with a specialization in Windows PowerShell. Don's broad IT experience includes work in the financial, telecommunications, software, manufacturing, consulting, training, and retail industries and he's one of the rare IT professionals who can not only "cross the line" between administration and software development, but also between IT workers and IT management.