I finally managed to free some time to install my first Windows 8 Developer Preview domain controllers in a test lab (thanks Vmdude). In this ldap389.local domain I installed two RWDCs named ldap389-pdce and ldap389-dc2, each one located in their own AD site. For the DC’s promotion you can read this two part post (here and here)

Once installation was completed, I launched the following Powershell command:

(get-module ActiveDirectory).exportedcommands

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Repadmin monitors the replication in your Active Directory Forest, you can read this AskDs post about this tool. The command line “repadmin /replsum” helps you retrieve the global forest replication status. The data retrieved for a given Domain Controller is:

• Largest Delta: longest time since he successfully replicated all the Naming Contexts with his replication partners.
• Number of failed replications that occured for all the Naming Contexts (aka Directory Partitions) with his replication partners.

The purpose of the powershell script is to analyse DC’s inbound replication thanks to the command line “repadmin /replsum /bydest”. If there are RODCs in your domain they do not show up if you use the /bysrc switch. You can read this post if you need to know more about running the repadmin /replsum command in a domain with RODCs.

If for a given DC the “largest delta” exceeds a given threshold (in minutes), or there are replication failures, we will read on the RootDSE object the msDS-ReplAllInboundNeighbors attribute. With that information we will retrieve which replication partners and “Naming Contexts” that are having trouble to replicate. You can retrieve the same type of information with the “replsum /showrepl %dc_name% /csv” command line, but the data stored in the msDS-ReplAllInboundNeighbors attribute is in XML format, which easy and convenient to manipulate with Powershell.

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