Determining the Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology Service Roles
Microsoft
Exchange Active Directory Topology service lists identified domain
controllers on the Exchange server properties page and identifies
servers belonging to either of two groups:
• Domain Controller Servers Being Used by Exchange—Domain
controllers that have been identified by Microsoft Exchange Active
Directory Topology service to be fully operational are shown here.
• Global Catalog Servers Being Used by Exchange—Global catalog servers are shown here.
A
third role was visible on the properties page in Exchange Server 2003;
however, it is not in the same location in Exchange Server 2013. The
third role is the following:
• Configuration domain controller—A
single AD domain controller is chosen as the configuration domain
controller to reduce the problems associated with replication latency
among AD domain controllers. In other words, if multiple domain
controllers were chosen to act as the configuration domain controller,
changes Exchange makes to the directory could conflict with each other.
The configuration domain controller role is transferred to other local
domain controllers in a site every 8 hours.
To
determine the default configuration domain controller, view the Event
Viewer application log and search for Event ID 2081. The results of the
Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology service query are listed here as well, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8. Identifying the default configuration domain controller.
In addition, the default configuration domain controller can be changed to one of your choice by performing the following steps:
1. Open the Exchange Management Shell.
2. Enter the command Get-ADServerSettings | fl. This shows the current default preferred domain controller (DefaultPreferredDomainController).
3. To change the preferred domain controller, enter the command Set-ADServerSettings –PreferredServer <server name>, as shown in Figure 9, to manually select the configuration domain controller.
Figure 9. Viewing and changing domain controllers and global catalog servers used by Exchange.
