Moving Active Directory operations masters is not something that you need to do every day, and I can never remember how to do it when I need to (well the RID, PDC, infrastructure and domain naming masters are easy enough, but I always forget how to move the schema master because it requires registration of the Active Directory Schema console).

As part of the final preparations for shutting down a virtual machine which I had running as a temporary domain controller, I needed to transfer all of the operations masters roles to the remaining permanent (physical) machine. Full details (along with details for identification of and seizing roles) can be found in the Active Directory how to… manage operations master roles section of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 TechCenter.