Knowing which Active Directory server(s) holds the following five roles is important for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that decommissioning a server that holds one or more of these roles may cause serious operational issues within a functioning domain.
The five FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation) roles are:
Schema Master Domain Naming Master Infrastructure Master Relative ID (RID) Master PDC Emulator
Find the server(s) that holds the roles from the command line:
netdom query fsmo
Or using PowerShell:
Get-ADForest | Select-Object DomainNamingMaster, SchemaMaster
– and –
Get-ADDomain | Select-Object RIDMaster, PDCEmulator, InfrastructureMaster
A follow-up article on transferring the roles can be found here: