Defining the Operations Master Roles

Most DC functionality in Windows 2000/2003/2008 and Windows Server 2012 was designed to be distributed, multimaster based. This effectively eliminated the single point of failure that was present with Windows NT primary domain controllers (PDCs). However, five functions still require the use of a single server because their functionality makes it impossible to follow a distributed approach. These operations master (OM) roles (previously referred to as FSMO roles) are as follows:

Schema master—There is only one writable master copy of the AD DS schema in a single AD DS forest. It was deliberately designed this way to limit access to the schema and to minimize potential replication conflicts. There can be ...

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