Renaming your AD domain

[PR.]

Currently working at a place that want to rename their domain sometime next year. I've had a read and it certainly seems possible, but wondered if anyone here had done it themselves, and what the experience was like?

We have most of the MS tech, Hyper-V Cluster, Exchange, SCCM, SCOM, SQL, ~40 Win2k3/8/12 servers, ~700 Windows 7 clients.

I'm expecting to spend months afterwards ironing out all the undocumented configurations that used the old domain name!

Thanks

 

[PR.]

Thanks for the replies, renaming definitely seems quite risky, I've seen some MS documentation on the process and I couldn't help thinking it wouldn't take much for it to fall apart.

A couple of years ago two schools merged to form a new one, unfortunately they moved to one of schools existing sites and inherited their AD domain which was called the old schools name. Obviously doesn't look very good to parents, students, and staff so there's a desire to get it changed.

I have been told they created a new domain last year and tried to join them but ended up causing a load of issues for people logging in, MS were called but they didn't know what the problem was so the new domain was removed.

There's currently three trains of thought:

1) Rename the domain, deal with the issues that crop up
2) Create a new domain, trust it with the old one and move things over
3) Create a new domain, don't connect it to the old one and rebuild everything.

TBH none of them sound great, and will definitely occupy most of the 6 weeks summer holidays next year to sort out!