Forest Migration

[HKNinja]

Our company has multiple domains under our enterprise forest. We recently acquired a new company which is also using a Win2k3 single domain/forest. we like to merge this new company's domain into our forest as a tree root. I have create new domains in our forest but never done a interforest migration. I only need to move this domain into our forest as a tree root and no need to change the AD structures (users, computers and groups, etc.) Can someone with experience in this give me some pointers? Thanks in advance!

_H

 

[TheMisio]

HKNinja,

You need to create (if you haven't already done so) a forest or domain trust and use ADMT v3(Active Directory Migration Tool) to migrate users, groups and machines to the target domain. If the source domain's OU structure is really complex, dump the OU info to csv, using excel change the domain part of it to your target domain and create LDIF file to import it to your target domain (this will save you creating all the OUs from scratch).

Unfortunately the domain rename doesn't work across different forest. This would be the easiest way to move the domain to a different tree....

Regards,

Michael

 

[HKNinja]

Thanks for the reply, Michael and happy labor day.

Well, I read the ADMT doc and it looks more like "migrating" another domain (source) into a existing domain (target). My goal is to "move" an existing tree in a standalone forest into my current forest as a tree root domain. I want to keep the user/OU/computer/group in its original domain. Does it make sense to you?