My own guidelines to perform schema update are below. Active Directory schema report by Ashley McGlone.Excellent blog about Schema update best practices.Keep in mind that operation itself is irreversible so only option to rollback to earlier state is forest recovery.Ĭouple links below, first one is Best Practice for schema updates and the second one is for getting the report out of AD DS schema: Schema update itself is a straightforward and safe operation. In general, you have two options, go live and trust your disaster recovery plans or perform schema update by disabling replication. Reason for this is that when administrators disabled replication from Domain Controllers during schema update they forgot to enable it again and it caused lots of tickets to Premier Support. Microsoft recommendation to perform schema updates back in the days was “offline” but they changed it several years ago from “offline” to “live”. Here is a guidance for AD DS upgrade in a nutshell.Įven Windows Server 2012 came with the feature that allows you to perform all necessary updates to AD DS schema directly from GUI I have always performed schema updates from command prompt manually, I really want to see what’s happening underneath the hood. Even the IT industry is talking about the cloud and everything cool inside of it most of the enterprise organizations still have an on-premises environment, right? There aren’t any significant changes when upgrading Active Directory Domain Services from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 level.

Windows server 2016 ad ds