Manage Replication

Active Directory is a multimaster directory, meaning that more than one Domain Controller (DC) can make changes to the data in the directory at the same time. Active Directory's replication engine is one of the best replication engines found anywhere in any product on the market. Not only can the architecture have multiple servers that perform write operations, but the replication of data occurs on an attribute level. This means that if you change an attribute in an object (for example, a user's last name), only the changed attribute is replicated to other DCs.

To accomplish this, Active Directory uses the concept of update sequence numbers (USNs). USNs are unique 64-bit numbers maintained by each DC. Every time an update is ...

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