Need to populate an AD lab with a bunch of users quickly? Here's a quick tip to automatically create lots of users with little effort. I use this PowerShell one-liner to populate labs pretty regularly. You'll need to do this on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Active Directory PowerShell installed and your DC needs to be running 2008 R2 or 2003/2008 with the AD Management Gateway installed. Open up a PowerShell session with the Active Directory modules imported:
PS C:\> Import-Module ActiveDirectory
… and then run the following command:
PS C:\> for ($i=0; $i -lt 1000; $i++) { New-ADUser -SamAccountName user$i -Name User$i -UserPrincipalName user$i@contoso.com -AccountPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText P@ssw0rd -Force) -Enabled $true)
This one-liner will create 1000 enabled user accounts named User0 – User999 with the password of P@ssw0rd. You can adjust the range of user IDs by changing the the $i=0; $i –lt 1000; part of the for loop to the range that you want. For example, if you want to create User2534 – User3145, you would change it to ($i=2534; $i –lt 3146; $i++).
On a modest virtualized Domain Controller (single CPU @ 2.66 GHz and 1GB RAM) I can create 1000 enabled users in about 2 minutes and 14 seconds, which is around 7-8 users per second. Not super fast, but enough to get a quick lab populated. I’ve used this one-liner in the past to create 1,000,000+ user environments for some virtualization testing and other things. It takes me about a day and a half to get 1,000,000 users created on my modest virtualized DC.
This is also a quick way to bloat your DIT if you want to do some scale and performance testing. To make your DIT bigger, you would want to inject some other data into these accounts, so in this command, you might add some additional attributes such as –DisplayName, –GivenName, –Surname, –Description, etc.