Using WMI to Manage AD Replication in Windows Server 2003

Monitoring Active Directory (AD) replication is a crucial management activity, especially in large enterprise environments that have many servers and a complex replication topology. AD administrators often need to use different tools or UIs (e.g., Replmon, Repadmin, the Microsoft Management Console—MMC—Active Directory Sites and Services snap-in) to manage replication between various AD servers. A bridgehead server or other important AD server disappearing from the network because of network connection problems or a domain controller (DC) crash can seriously affect the replication topology. In this case, you might need to force a Knowledge Consistency Checker (KCC) execution to recalculate the replication topology. In some situations or environments, you might need to automate some typical AD management operations such as the KCC execution or force the replication of a specific naming context (NC) in response to some event. In Windows 2000 Server, these types of tasks are almost impossible to automate in a custom application without calling some specific AD Win32 APIs. However, Windows Server 2003 includes an AD replication Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider that abstracts some KCC execution and replication APIs, simplifying some management operations. Let's take a look at the new AD replication WMI provider and its classes. . . .