We are planning to demote 2(total 8 DC's) 2008 R2 domain controllers(virtual) and following are some notes:
We don't have DNS hosted on AD (External, on Infoblox)
Same with DHCP, on infoblox
No FSMO roles on these 2
These are not DFS name space servers
Not ADFS, KMS or CA hosted on these
We came across the following article for an impact analysis: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/50925.active-directory-checklist-for-decommissioning-a-domain-controller.aspx
One of the action plans suggests to power off the domain controllers for 1 or 2 weeks to remediate any dependencies (after impact analysis) and then demote and decommission the server eventually.
These 2 seemed to be the first domain controllers in the company.
Based on your experience, do you see any issues with powering off dc's for 2 weeks? We won't remove the SRV records until they are decommissioned but powering the dc's off will create any slowness in authentication or something?
We also have Linux servers using LDAP but I am not sure if they will have any impact.
Please suggest if there are any precautions or steps to take care before we commence the decommission
Thank you in advance!