domain controller redundancy

[kerwinator]

Quick couple of questions. I brought up a second domain controller yesterday in a single doamin environment. They are both global catalog servers. I want this new one to be the Master (holding the 5 FSMO roles). So I know I need to manually transfer the roles. My question is, if this new DC were to crash or be rebooted what won't work while those roles are down? If it is a long term outage I just need to manually move the roles back to the original DC right?

From what I have read it seems both DC's cannot simultaneously hold all 5 roles for complete redundancy.

Thanks

 

[Big0range]

Correct, only one DC can hold a particular role. You can split the roles among separate DCs or have one machine hold all roles. However, you should see no impact other than replication issues during a reboot or short downtime as long as you have AD-integrated DNS available. And yes, if one is going to be down for more than a few hours, you would want to assign any roles the other DC.