Microsoft DNS - DNS Server

Microsoft Windows server operating systems can run the DNS Server service. This is a monolithic DNS server that provides many types of DNS service, including caching, Dynamic DNS update, zone transfer, and DNS notification. DNS notification implements a push mechanism for notifying a select set of secondary servers for a zone when it is updated.

Microsoft's "DNS Server" service was first introduced in Windows NT 3.51 as an add-on with Microsoft's collection of BackOffice services (at the time was marked to be used for testing purposes only). Some sources claim that the DNS server implementation in Windows NT 3.51 was a fork of ISC's BIND version 4.3, but this is not true. The DNS server implementation in Windows NT 3.51 was written by Microsoft. The DNS server component in all subsequent releases of Windows Server have built upon that initial implementation and do not use BIND source code. However, Microsoft has taken care to ensure good interoperability with BIND and other implementations in terms of zone file format, zone transfer, and other DNS protocol details.

As of 2004, it was the fourth most popular DNS server (counting BIND version 9 separately from versions 8 and 4) for the publication of DNS data.

Like various other DNS servers, Microsoft's DNS server supports different database back ends. Microsoft's DNS server supports two such back ends. DNS data can be stored either in master files (also known as zone files) or in the Active Directory database itself. In the latter case, since Active Directory (rather than the DNS server) handles the actual replication of the database across multiple machines, the database can be modified on any server ("multiple-master replication"), and the addition or removal of a zone will be immediately propagated to all other DNS servers within the appropriate Active Directory "replication scope". (Contrast this with BIND, where when such changes are made, the list of zones, in the /etc/named.conf file, has to be explicitly updated on each individual server.)

Microsoft's DNS server can be administered using either a graphical user interface, the "DNS Management Console", or a command line interface, the dnscmd utility. New to Windows Server 2012 is a fully featured PowerShell provider for DNS server management.