Active Directory Takeover to consolidate AD domains?

Hi,
Please can you tell me whether UCS AD Takeover can be used to consolidate AD Domains after connecting sites.

I have two sites in each with their own AD domains e.g. intranet.companyA{dot}com and intranet.companyB{dot}com which are currently separate.

The organisations are to be consolidated and we will shortly be linking the sites with a fiber since they are physically next door to each other.

We wish to use UCS to manage the IT infrastructure and services. Ultimately we wish to create a hybrid environment with current Windows servers retired and UCS providing both local on-site and managing cloud services (VMMs etc).

Our plan was to initially install UCS at both sites using a new domain name like siteX.newco{dot}com i.e. two master UCS servers and perform either an AD Connection or an AD Takeover of each sites AD Domain. When the two sites are connected we would want to merge the two UCS domains and perhaps retain both UCS servers to provide redundancy and resilience by converting to a Master-Backup from Master-Master.

Ultimately the Win7 client machines and users accounts from each AD domain need to usable across the whole site.

Could this be done? If anyone could offer detailed guidance that would be really appreciated!

Thank you

Julian
Protek

It appear that a few members have read this post but no-one has replied.

Have I asked a silly question or maybe missed out some vital detail.

Please let me know.

Thanks.

Hi Protek,
the scenario you described is not recommended, at least from my point of view. As far as i know, there is no way to downgrade from a ucs-master to a ucs-backup-server.

I would rather merge both of the AD-Domains in the first step, then do a AD-Takeover and as last step setup a ucs-backup-server.

There are some informations about the first step on Technet: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc974332(v=ws.10).aspx

I have never done this and considering the complexity i advice you to test your procedure in a non-productive environment first.

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