Check if a Domain Controller has been cloned

active-directoryclonedomain-controllerimagingwindows-server-2008-r2

I have reason to believe that previous administrators cloned our Domain Controller at somepoint in its recent lifetime. The DC at one point was running on Server 2003 and has since been upgraded to Server 2008 R2 Standard. The functional level sits at 2008 as well. Clonning a domain controller is not supported by Microsoft until Server 2012. We have seen many odities that do not make sense and believe that our secondary DC is simply a clone of the primary. Or even our existing Primary DC a clone of a past DC. Our DC are VM's running on Microsofts Hyper-V. Currently they sit on a host with Server 20012 R2 and our second DC is hosted on a Server 2008 R2.

Does anyone know if there is a way to see if a DC has been cloned?

Best Answer

PS GetSid from Sysinternals will show if the SIDS match.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897417.aspx

If they match then that's the answer, if they are different then it won't show if it was cloned and sysprep'd, or changed via another method, or not a clone at all.

OTOH, MS provides a 180 day free trial, spin up a new 2012 vm, promote it and then remove AD from the possible clone. If the problems stop then there is at least one known solution.

[EDIT] Above is incorrect, thank you @RyanRies.
GetSID will return the same computer account SID for all DC's in a domain. In a non-cloned environment, 2 DC's in the same site: ADSIEdit will list different ObjectGUID's and the ObjectSID will match the GETSID + "-%4DifferentDigits%".