How to set different preferred Domain Controllers to be used for only specific GPOs (4225563)

There may be scenarios where GPOAdmin needs to query a different DC depending on the GPO.

Example: There is a parent domain in Europe and a child domain in North America. One GPOADmin server in the Europe domain handling GPO administration using a local preferred DC for the Europe domain and a child DC for the NA domain in NA. For specific GPOs it may be beneficial to instead use a preferred DC which is a child DC of the NA region physically located in Europe rather than use the normal preferred DC for the NA domain

This can be accomplished by creating registry values for the GPOs, using Regedit or using Powershell.

To manually create the registry keys using Regedit:

1. Open Regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Quest\GPOADmin\ServerConfig\PreferredDomainControllers\Overrides
   Note: You may need to create the Overrides key
3. Create a string value with the name set to the Live ID of the GPO, including the curly braces
   Note: You can obtain the Live ID from GPOAdmin by right clicking the GPO and selecting Properties. The Unique ID is the Live ID
4. Set the value to the FQDN of the preferred DC that should be used for this GPO

To create the registry keys using Powershell:

1. Open Powershell and load the GPOADmin powershell module
2. Change Directory to VCRoot: (Optional CD through the containers to the container holding the GPO)
3. You can either CD to the container under VCRoot where the GPO is located in GPOADmin, or use the –r switch (as shown in step 4) to search through the entire container structure for the GPO. This is much more efficient when done in the same container as the GPO as the recursive search will add time in large environments.  
4. Run the command: dir –r -GPO | ?{$_.Name -like ""} | %{New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Quest\GPOADmin\ServerConfig\PreferredDomainControllers\Overrides\" -Name $_.Id.ToString("B") -Value "" -PropertyType STRING -Force | Out-Null

NOTE:  should be replaced with the name of the GPO. should be replaced with the fqdn of the chosen DC. This override feature is only available in version 5.12 and later.