FSMO Roles

[Jeff]

Hi. I want to know if anyone has any additional information on this.
We have one domain, one site, one forest in two physical locations.
The second location is for disaster recovery only. There is a DC in
each site and replication is working fine. Everything I have seen
says that if the FSMO roles are sized by another DC, the first must
never come back online. Is there any way around this? If our main
site goes down and we have to work out of the remote site, the DC may
need some or all of those roles. If that is the case, when things go
back to normal, is there an easy way back? The remote site would only
be used for a few days at a time at most.

 

[Simon Geary]

The PDC Emulator role should be seized by another DC whenever the original
role holder goes offline. This is the one role that can happily be seized
between DC's without causing major problems.

You are correct about all the other roles. if they are seized then the
original DC should never be brought back online. This will cause untold
problems so should not be done.

The good news is that the PDC Emulator role is probably the only one you
really need for day to day operations. The other ones you can do without
almost indefinitely so there is no need to seize the roles just because you
are moving to your DR site for a couple of days. If you will only be using
the other site for a few days at a time you can safely leave the FSMO roles
where they are.

 

[Jeff]

Ok. Let me throw a wrench in here. One other thing we need to do is
to replicate Exchange mailboxes to another server and then back again.
We were told this really couldnt be done but have found a way to do
it. Basically, we restore the information store to the new server,
allow for replication and then delete the old mailboxes, mount the
store and reconnect the users mailboxes. How will that fit into this
situation?

 

[Simon Geary]

Sorry, don't know much about Exchange I'm afraid, best to punt that one off
to the Exchange group.