Domain Functional Level Differences
Functional level determines the active directory domain services capabilities in domain and forest.
Domain functional level differences. You can run on domain controllers in the domain or forest. Domain functional levels and forest functional levels. The active directory functional levels of a ad domain or ad forest controls which advanced features are available in the ad domain or ad forest.
Introduction this is a brief and high level blog on the windows domain functional level dfl. Open up powershell and run following cmdlets. There are some explanations with the functions up to windows server 2008 r2 and some on the differences between windows server 2008 r2 and windows server 2012.
The active directory functional levels of a ad domain or ad forest depends on which versions of windows server operating systems are running on the domain controllers in the ad domain or ad forest. Die folgenden tabelle stellt dar wie sich die windows server versionen bezüglich domain functional levels geändert haben. The output would look like below.
However functional levels do not affect which operating systems you can run on workstations and member servers that are joined to the domain or forest. Functional levels determine the available active directory domain services ad ds domain or forest capabilities. Get adforest gets an active directory forest.
The domain functional level is programmatically raised to the second functional level by directly modifying the value of the msdsbehaviorversion attribute on the domaindns object. Feature set of a particular dfl will be available for a dc if it runs on the operating system version that is compatible with the functional level. Domain functional level dfl determines the features of a domain controller dc based on the windows server operating system os it runs on.
Domain and forest functional level enables domain and forest wide features withing network. The domain functional level is raised to the second functional level by using the ldp exe utility or the adsiedit msc utility. With windows server 2012 and r2 it is possible to roll back forest and domain functional level with limitation as defined in table in the link.