Active Directory FSMO Roles

Knowing which Active Directory server(s) holds the following five roles is important for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that decommissioning a server that holds one or more of these roles may cause serious operational issues within a functioning domain.

The five FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation) roles are:

Schema Master
Domain Naming Master
Infrastructure Master
Relative ID (RID) Master
PDC Emulator

Find the server(s) that holds the roles from the command line:

netdom query fsmo

Or using PowerShell:

Get-ADForest | Select-Object DomainNamingMaster, SchemaMaster

– and –

 Get-ADDomain | Select-Object RIDMaster, PDCEmulator, InfrastructureMaster 

A follow-up article on transferring the roles can be found here: