Recently when working with my home lab environment I needed to demote the last Windows 2012 Domain Controller in my site. After all it is a lab environment, but in the future as new versions of Windows become available organizations may require the same option. After playing with powershell commands for awhile and receiving various warnings, I realized this was a lot simpler than it first appeared. So I wanted to share the powershell commands required to ensure that the last Windows 2012 domain controller in a domain can be demoted with ease.
- Login to the server as an administrator account
- Open the Active Directory module for Powershell on the domain controller you are demoting
- Type Uninstall-ADDSDomainController –LastDomainControllerInDomain –RemoveApplicationPartitions and press enter
- Enter the credentials of the administrator account twice
- This process will automatically log you off and reboot
That’s all that’s to it!
Interested in learning more about demoting domain controllers, here is some additional documentation with more information on this topic. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh472163.aspx#BKMK_RemovePS24x7it
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