Simple way to list FSMO Roles in Active Directory

Stefan Dingemanse
Date : January 12, 2015
Categories : Active Directory
Tags :

This tip explains the simplest way to check FSMO Roles availability in an Active Directory Forest environment.

FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operations) Roles are very critical for Active Directory to run smoothly. As part of the daily Active Directory health tasks, you need to run several command lines tools or customized scripts to check the status of various Active Directory components which includes checking availability of the FSMO Roles.

To check the availability of FSMO Roles in an Active Directory environment, you can run following command line tools (available by default with Operating System installation):

<pre class="brush: text; auto-links: false; collapse: false; first-line: 1; gutter: false; html-script: false; light: false; ruler: false; smart-tabs: true; tab-size: 4; toolbar: false;">Netdom Query FSMO

Advantage using NetDom command is that it returns the list with FSMO name and the server holding that FSMO role as shown in the below output. The server name is returned in the FQDN format.

<pre class="brush: text; auto-links: false; collapse: false; first-line: 1; gutter: false; html-script: false; light: false; ruler: false; smart-tabs: true; tab-size: 4; toolbar: false;">Schema master 	             TEST-DC01.brainpulse.nl 
Domain naming master         TEST-DC01.brainpulse.nl 
PDC 			             TEST-DC01.brainpulse.nl 
RID pool manager 	         TEST-DC01.brainpulse.nl 
Infrastructure master 	     TEST-DC01.brainpulse.nl

I hope this post will help you to find out the FSMO roles in a simple way.