Now that we have completed the AD pre-reqs, we can now look to deploy our new Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller.

Deploy the base OS (Server 2012 R2) to the target device, be it physical or virtual. Carry out the standard configuration items for domain controllers (Static IP, Hostname, Updates, RDP, etc).

Once complete, open up Server Manager and navigate to Manage > Add Roles and Features

Select Role Based or Feature Based Installation

Select your Server from the list – if this is your first Server 2012 R2 server without server pools configured, you will only see the local server in the list.

Select ADDS (Active Directory Domain Servers)

Hit Add Features (this is a list of default features required for ADDS).

Leave the features default and select Next.

Read the AD blurb if required, hit next.

The following dialog box will be shown if you choose to allow for automatic restarts – I hit yes, you may choose to manually restart if that is your preference.

Hit install, and wait.

Once installation has completed, hit close.

In the top right of Server Manager, you will now see a Yellow Exclamation mark. This is note that post-deployment configuration is required. Select this flag and select Promote to Domain Controller.

We will be adding this server to an existing domain. By default the domain that you have joined this server to will be shown in the Domain field.

If the user you are logged in with does not have permissions to promote as domain controller, this can be changed here.

As we will be demoting the existing Domain Controller, we will make this server a DNS and GC Server and add it to the relevant site.

Enter your DSRM password – for obvious reasons, I wont be disclosing mine 🙂

Ignore the following error and select next.

We can specify which domain controller to replicate records from – as we only have one active DC in this domain, this can be left as “any domain controller”. You may wish to change this to your Primary DC if you have multiple DCs deployed.

Select the locations for your NTDS database, Logs and SYSVOL folder.

Review your options and select Next if you are happy with the configuration.

After Pre-Req checks, you will have the option to hit Install.

After a restart, you will have a fully promoted domain controller. You can open AD Sites and Services to confirm.

Now that we have deployed our first Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller, we can now look to demote. Before doing so, we must move all FSMO roles to the newly promoted DC. The following powershell command can be used to move all roles at once. Forest Functional FSMO Roles and Domain Functional FSMO roles should ideally be segregated but as this is a home lab, this is not important to me.

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity “Target_DC_Name” –OperationMasterRole 0,1,2,3,4

Once all FSMO roles have been moved, we can now demote our Server 2008 DC and we have completed our migration.