The IPA domain is defined and managed by an IPA server which is essentially a domain controller. There can be multiple domain controllers within a domain for load-balancing and failover tolerance. These additional servers are called replicas of the master IPA server.

Both IPA servers and replicas only run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. For both servers and replicas, the necessary packages must be installed and then the IPA server or replica itself is configured through setup scripts, which configure all of the requisite services.