In t post in this series, we examined the SYSVOL migration process and understood how things work at a high level during the process of migration of the SYSVOL share from the FRS service to the DFS Replication service. Windows Server 2008 includes a command line tool called dfsrmig.exe which can be used by administrators to control the process of migrating replication of the SYSVOL share from FRS to the DFS Replication service. In this post, we take a closer look at this tool. The following posts in this series will explain how to migrate replication to each of the migration states in greater detail.

The DFS Replication service’s migration tool (dfsrmig.exe) is installed along with the DFS Replication service. This tool can be executed on any domain controller, however, any operations which perform AD object creation/manipulation tasks are only allowed on Read-Write capable domain controllers (not on RODCs). An example of such tasks is the creation/deletion of both FRS and DFSR global settings required for replication activity. In such cases, the tool will always try to connect to the Primary Domain Controller’s Active Directory for processing migration related directives, and will fail if it is unable to reach the Primary Domain Controller’s Active Directory.