Flexible Single Master Operation in short FSMO. If you are a system admin you will be well aware of this abbreviation as it’s a core topic of Active Directory Domain Services. There are 5 FSMO roles a) Schema master b) Domain naming master c) Infrastructure master e) RID master f) PDC Emulator.

As you know there is no strict rules that all of these roles should be on one single Domain controller. An admin can decide and split the roles to different domain controllers if it’s a large forest. But then keeping the Schema master role and Domain master role in single domain controller is recommended as it will reduce the administration overhead. But again there is no strict rule!

Moving or splitting these roles using GUI is quite lengthy process but ever since the power shell was introduced with Windows Server 2008 most of the administration task has become easier. So today you are going to learn some power shell commands to move the 5 FSMO roles in simple way.

 First let’s check the current FSMO role holders.

For that type in netdom query fsmo in your powershell window. See the below result.

Here the current owner of Schema master role is DC.contoso.com and we will move moving this role to another domain controller named Server1.contoso.com

In order to move the Schema master role you should execute the below command in power shell console.

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity Server1 -OperationMasterRole DomainNamingMaster

You will be promoted with various options to access/deny the changes. Press Y to proceed.

Finally if you wish to see the result execute the command again netdom query fsmo

Also you can execute the command as below to move multiple FSMO roles.

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity Server1 -OperationMasterRole DomainNamingMaster,DomainNaming Master, InfrastructureMaster

Also you can use the corresponding numbers instead of the complete role name.

Role Name	Number
PDCEmulator	0
RIDMaster	1
InfrastructureMaster	2
SchemaMaster	3
DomainNamingMaster	4

 Note: If I want to test something quickly I always relay on Microsoft Technet Labs and these Screenshots are taken from Microsoft technet labs.