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Sometimes it’s unavoidable to run an Active Directory domain controller (DC) on hardware that is configured with two network cards (NICS). While not a recommended configuration, it is possible to run a domain controller with two IP addresses. In this Ask an Admin, I’ll show you how to configure the NICs and DNS so that AD runs smoothly. This lab assumes you have one DC in your AD domain running DNS, configured with two NICs, each with one IPv4 address.
Even if you have two NICS, and two IP addresses on your DC, only one of those IP addresses should be registered in DNS. In this example, my DC is assigned 192.168.0.117/24 on the first network adapter, and the second 172.16.0.6/24. I want AD to use 172.16.0.6/24 on the second adapter, so the first task is to stop the other address being automatically registered in DNS.
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One option is to leave the DNS server properties for the adapter empty. Alternatively, if that’s not an option, following these instructions.
Now that I have stopped the unwanted address from registering itself with DNS, I’ll configure the DNS server running on the DC to listen exclusively on the 172.16.0.6 address.
Now that we have only one IP address registered in DNS, old records deleted, and the DNS server listening on one IP address, let’s tidy up the DNS settings on the DC.
Don’t forget that you will likely need to reboot clients and member servers to make sure that they use the updated DNS configuration and don’t resolve to the wrong address.
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