If you have been keeping up with my AD LDS 101 series, you have seen how to perform a number of tasks in getting your AD LDS instance set up and synchronized with your Active Directory domain controller. At this point, it is only logical to show you how you can replicate the synchronized data to other AD LDS instances that you have set up in your environment.
Instance replication is very simple and a highly effective way to get your data synchronized across distributed instances in your organization. There are many reasons for performing this replication, the main reason, in my experience, being failover and redundancy in the event of a failure with one of your valued AD LDS instances. Below is a step-by-step guide on replicating your instances.
Replicating AD LDS Instances
Replicating your AD LDS instances can be useful in a distributed environment or where high availability is required. To replicate the instance you created from the steps in this guide, please use the following steps. Note that the Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services role will need to be installed on the server that will host the replicated AD LDS instance.
- On the server where the replicated AD LDS instance will reside, go to Start –> Administrator Tools –> Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services Setup Wizard.
Click Next.
- Under Setup Options, select the option for “A replica of an existing instance”
Click Next.
- Provide a name for the replica instance.
Click Next.
- AD LDS will select a port for this instance unless you input a port of your own specification.
Click Next.
- Enter the server and port information for the AD LDS instance that will provide the data for replication.
Click Next.
- Select an administrative user who will have privileges over the configuration set for the replicated instance.
Click Next.
- Select the partition that will be replicated to this instance.
Click Next.
- Leave the file locations as the default unless requirements dictate otherwise.
Click Next.
- Under Service Account Selection, make a selection appropriate to your environment.
- Network service account if you are using AD LDS as a stand-alone instance and the end point is not a domain controller.
- This account with its associated User name/password if you are installing AD LDS on a domain controller.
Attention:If you select Network service account, you must add the passPrompt flag when installing the AD LDS Synchronization configuration XML file. You can avoid this by selecting This Account with the User name and Password for an Administrative user.
If you select Network service account, the following warning may appear.
Click Yes to continue.
- Click Next to select the account and display the AD LDS Administrators dialog box.
- Under Ready to Install check the details of the replicated instance and then click Next to begin the installation.
- Once the installation has completed successfully, click Finish and open ADSI Edit. Within ADSI Edit, connect to the newly replicated instance to see that all data has been properly replicated.
After this final step, my hope is that you have colored your hair silver, popped a cigar in your mouth and exclaim, “I love it when a plan comes together!” If you have, then your AD LDS instance has been fully replicated. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or see any changes that need to be made.
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Great articles, nice to finally have some in depth reading material.
I’m hoping you can answer a question for me though. I setup an AD LDS instance successfully and was asked to sync some additional attributes. When adding them to my .xml file for the sync, I received an error. When I went and looked my instance and looked at the properties on one of the uses I sync over originally, I notice that they did not have the attributes I was attempting to sync. I was trying to add employeenumber, accountexpires and useraccountcontrol and the attributes weren’t there to sync with. I went through the schema and modified cn=user and added the attributes. But!!!! No Pleasure there either. Can you help me out??