How to Transfer Infrastructure Master FSMO Role to a Different Server

Transferring the Infrastructure Master FSMO Role

The Infrastructure Master is one of the five FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operations) roles in Active Directory, responsible for keeping cross-domain object references up to date. Moving it to a different domain controller — for example ahead of decommissioning the DC that currently holds it — is done through ntdsutil. From an elevated command prompt on any domain controller, logged in with an Enterprise Admin account:

ntdsutil
roles
connections
connect to server DC2
quit
transfer infrastructure master
quit
quit

Replace DC2 with the name of the domain controller you want to hold the role going forward. When you run transfer infrastructure master, ntdsutil will ask you to confirm — accept the prompt and it will move the role to the connected server. One important caveat: don’t hold the Infrastructure Master role on a domain controller that’s also a Global Catalog server, unless every domain controller in the domain is also a Global Catalog (which is the norm in most single-domain environments). If it’s on a GC alongside non-GC DCs elsewhere in a multi-domain forest, the Infrastructure Master won’t function correctly, since it assumes it can see references that only Global Catalogs hold locally.

The PowerShell Alternative (Updated for 2026)

If you’d rather not step through ntdsutil‘s interactive prompts, the Active Directory PowerShell module offers a single-command equivalent, run from any machine with the AD module installed:

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity "DC2" -OperationMasterRole InfrastructureMaster

This does the same job as the ntdsutil sequence above in one line, and it accepts a comma-separated list of role names if you’re moving more than one FSMO role to the same target DC at once (for example InfrastructureMaster,RIDMaster,PDCEmulator). The same Global Catalog caveat above still applies regardless of which method you use to move the role.

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