How to Set the Primary Federation Server in ADFS 2.0

In some event that the primary Federation Server becomes unavailable and will not be brought back online, we need to promote one of the secondary Federation Servers to primary for the farm.

The below Command to run on the secondary server which we want to make primary:

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Adfs.PowerShell

Set-AdfsSyncProperties -Role PrimaryComputer 

Now that we have set a new Primary Federation Server, we need to configure the other Secondary Federation Servers to sync with the new Primary Federation Server

Command to run on the other farm member servers:

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Adfs.Powershell

Set-AdfsSyncProperties -Role SecondaryComputer -PrimaryComputerName {FQDN of the Primary Federation Server}

The WID database on the primary server is read/write and the WID database on the secondary server(s) are read-only.

Changes made to the configuration are made only on the primary Federation Server and those changes are replicated (5 minutes interval by default) to the secondary servers via WID database synchronization.