I have several questions concerning Win 2003 and Win 2008 R2 domain controllers. I recently added new DCs running windows 2008 R2 to an existing Win 2003 environment. Now I have 5 domain controllers. One DC running Win 2003 has all the FSMO roles and it runs as a virtual machine, not physical.
1) If I demote that DC that has all the FSMO roles, will it transfer all of them to the next available DC?
2) If I choose to manually transfer the roles, what is proper or best practice method of spreading out the roles?
3) Most of the older DCs have a primary DNS zone AD-integrated. But they also have manually added zones. The newly added DCs do not have them. Is there a way to push these zones to the newly added DCs?
4) if I unplug a DC from the topology and plug it back after several days later, will it create any issues? Shouldn't it simply rejoin the topology and update itself in AD?
5) I also would like to move a DC to another network location, not in the same place but in a different subnet over a WAN link. Of course reachable to all the other DCs. What is the proper way to change the IP, mask, gw information, etc on that DC and physically move and plug it back in?