Domain-controller migration

If you decide to avoid potential in-place upgrade issues, but still want to upgrade your domain controllers to Windows Server 2016, you need to perform domain-controller migration. Although the word migration might make you nervous, domain-controller migration is actually a straightforward process. You just need to have Windows Server 2016 as a clean, installed operating system. Then, you can start the process of adding additional domain controllers in an existing domain, which is explained in one of the previous sections. During this process, DNS Zones, AD DS databases, and SYSVOL folders will be replicated on the new server.

Once you have at least two Windows Server 2016 domain controllers added to the existing domain, you can start the process of removing the old domain controllers. Before doing this, however, you need to do the following:

• Transfer all FSMO roles to new domain controllers.
• Change the IP addresses for the DNS servers to all domain computers.

Once you finish those tasks, you can start to remove the old domain controllers from the domain. When you remove the old domain controllers, you can upgrade the domain and the forest functional level to Windows Server 2016. After that, the domain and domain controllers are fully upgraded to the Windows Server 2016 version.