- [Instructor] Active Directory Domain Services
is one of the Windows Server roles
that evolves at least slightly with each new version
of Windows Server.
The Active Directory Domain Services Schema
is the design of the database
that defines what types of objects are stored,
what properties are maintained for each object,
and how these different objects
or classes relate to each other.
If you're a beginner to databases
consider a simple database application, like Access.
When you create a database in Access
you create tables for each type of information
or class of object that you want to track,
computers, operating systems, users, and so forth.
In each table you have a list of fields or properties
that describe each record or object in the table.
Perhaps for a computer your defining properties
are the name of the computer, the location,
or various configuration details.
If your environment were to grow and become more diverse
you're going to need to track more things.
You're going to need more tables,
you're going to need to add
or redefine fields within those tables,
and you may need to redraw relationships between them.
This kind of change needs to happen when you introduce
a new version of Windows Server as a domain controller
in an Active Directory domain.
You can make those changes manually
before adding a Windows 2019 server
as a domain controller in a previous version,
say 2016 Server domain.
The AD prep application is on the Windows Server 2019 disk.
If I was to just browse out to the install media
inside the support folder here is adprep
for Active Directory prep.
And inside that folder is the adprep application.
But it's not necessary to run that separately.
It's understood that this kind of upgrade needs to happen.
Promoting a Windows 2019 server to domain controller
will run this elevation for you.
Let me go ahead and close this
and let's take a look at our Windows 2016 server
domain controller.
Here we have our domain controller,
you can see that Active Directory Domain Services
is installed
and that this is a Windows Server 2016
Datacenter edition server.
It's been configured in a virtual machine
with eight GIG of RAM that's dynamically expanding.
So you'll see the installed memory fluctuate a little bit
as we go through this process.
I'm going to first open PowerShell
and take a look at the functional level of Active Directory
on this server.
I can do that with the Get-AdObject commandlet.
And specifically what I want to look for
is going to be pulled from the Get-AdRootDSE commandlet.
And there's a specific property inside those results
that I want to pull.
And that is the schemaNamingContext.
And I'm going to get even more specific than that
as I look up a specific property of that object,
the objectVersion.
And when we take a look at the results
we can see that our Active Directory Schema
is of the objectVersion 87.
I'm going to leave this screen right here,
so we can come back and compare later.
Let's switch back over to our Windows 2019 server.
We can see that this server
has already been joined to the domain,
so let me go ahead and add
the Active Directory Domain Services role.
From the Dashboard, Add roles and features,
we've seen this Wizard before.
As we get to the list of roles
I'm going to select Active Directory Domain Services.
There are several prerequisites and tools
that need to be added,
I'm going to accept all of them.
And then I will go ahead and just progress
to the point where it starts the installation.
Now Windows Server 2019 seems to install things
a little quicker than previous versions,
but it still takes a while,
so we're going to fast-forward through this progress bar
and get to the next stage.
All right, here we are.
And now I'm going to follow this link
to Promote this server to a domain controller.
Remember, this is a Windows 2019 server,
becoming a domain controller
alongside an existing Windows Server 2016 domain.
So when I choose to promote
the first screen is probably the most important.
This is where I specify that I am adding a domain controller
to an existing domain.
I need to specify the domain
and I need to make sure that the credentials provided here,
the currently logged on user, or I could change it,
this is a user account that has the permissions
and rights necessary to create a new domain controller
in our Active Directory environment.
And that is all correct,
so I'm going to go ahead and move forward.
I'll specify a password here.
And accept defaults the rest of the way through.
No DNS delegation is available,
that's fine, that was to be expected.
Here I'm prompted to select which domain controller
I want to replicate my information from,
so I'll go ahead and choose
the Windows 2016 domain controller.
Next, the paths are fine.
The Preparation Options,
this is where it's telling me
that it's going to have to perform
the following Active Directory preparation.
This forest and schema preparation.
And then adding and modifying objects within the domain
to fit the new schema.
This is where I'm being told that that will be done for me.
So Next.
Review the options, let it do the Prerequisite Check.
And it's just reminding me of the old legacy
NT 4 security concerns,
as well as pointing out
that the DNS delegation can't happen.
Both of those were expected and not really errors
as far as I'm concerned.
And everything passed.
So let me go ahead and click Install.
Notice that when I do the first thing
that shows up up here in the Progress
was updating the forest and updating the domain.
That was the AD prep being done for us.
Once this installation is complete
and the server is rebooting
I'm going to switch back over to the 2016 server
and let's check that version again.
Okay, now that the reboot
of our new domain controller is complete
here we are back on our Windows 2016 server.
Remember, previously we found that our schema
was objectVersion 87.
I'm going to take advantage of the command memory
in PowerShell and use the up arrow,
so that I don't have to type out
that big, long command again.
When I run that again we can see
that the objectVersion has changed.
It doesn't appear to have changed by a lot,
but we can see that the Active Directory preparation
built into configuring the role on a new server
was able to complete on its own.
In theory you can perform an in-place upgrade
on a Windows 2012 RT or a Windows 2016 domain controller,
so long as you stop and restart some services.
But I've had mixed results in my testing.
It's best practice to go ahead and bring up a new server
and you've seen just how easy it is to perform this upgrade
on Active Directory.