SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 Migration

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bobmeister

106 posts

Master Geek

#32592 20-Apr-2009 15:53

I purchased a 64 bit machine last year for a customer, with the intention of running SBS2008 on it. As it was before SBS 2008 was released, I got this real good deal from Dell with SBS Software Assurance and it came with SBS 2003.

I have received the disks for SBS2008 and want to move to this OS.

From what I have read, there is no upgrade path from SBS 2003 to 2008. So if I am going to use the same machine, am I going to have to rebuild the machine (or have two Virtual machines).

I would love to do an upgrade, but is this not possible?

Any comments would be welcome.

Anyone installed SBS2008. What are the pitfalls?

mjb

996 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#208182 20-Apr-2009 16:10

Not 'great' advice, sorry.. but there is a migration path. If you can afford the time though, I'd go for the rebuild option.

The nice thing about SBS'08 is that you get Hyper-V and two guest licenses I believe. That may have changed since I was last looking into it (about 8 monhts ago).

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allan

2043 posts

Uber Geek

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#208189 20-Apr-2009 16:49

Microsoft have published a migration guide http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=52b7ea63-78af-4a96-811e-284f5c1de13b&displaylang=en, but guys at my work have had good sucess with the Swing Migration kit http://www.sbsmigration.com which appears to provide a more elegant solution.

The downside is, you have to pay for it and the 2003 to 2008 process documentation is still in beta.

bobmeister

106 posts

Master Geek

#208195 20-Apr-2009 17:07

I'm feeling a rebuild coming on. I've only got 20 in the AD, so I can copy all their mailboxes into Personal folders and then move them back afterwards.

I'll take an image of the SBS2003 disk in case it all turns to sh#t.

exportgoldman

1202 posts

Uber Geek

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#208217 20-Apr-2009 19:55

The offical Microsoft SBS blog says that nearly all customers brought a new server when upgrading to SBS 2008, so thats what they optimised their upgrade path for.

I've done SBS migrations for longer than I care to say :) my advise would be one of a few options depending on how experienced you are, if you have any spare server grade machines hanging around and what your downtime windows are like.

Temporary Hardware.

1. Use Shadowprotect (www.shadowprotect) to take a ful image of this server. (don't forget to pull the plug on the internet to make sure no e-mails come in during the backup which will be missed.)

2. Setup machine with VMWare Server or player. It can read ShadowProtect files directly, startup the existing SBS server on this machine as a temporary place for it to live during the migration. Make sure the hard drives/memory is fast and big enough.

3. Wipe clean and re-setup existing server.

4. use the migration wizards to move data/shares/first exchange server in a organisation.

Virtual Server, same hardware

1. Do steps 1 through 3 as above

2. Setup SBS 2008 on new hardware.

3. Install VMWare and then startup Shadowprotect image on SBS2008.

4. do migration as per step four above.

I wouldn't reccomend this as it requires far more downtime (good part of a day) and if your backup didn't work it's too late. Dragons lie here.

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exportgoldman

1202 posts

Uber Geek

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#208218 20-Apr-2009 19:56

I forgot to mention I'm running a x3200 with SATA drives (RAID1) with 5GB of memory and it took a few hours to install.

SBS 2008 has much bigger hardware requirements. It eats RAM for breakfast. Make sure you have enough, I also find it sluggish on SATA drives even with only myself as a user.

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

bobmeister

106 posts

Master Geek

#208309 21-Apr-2009 10:23

My experience with SBS is installing SBS 2003 on 3 difference customer machines and reinstalling my own several times. This is my first go with SBS 2008, so its a new experience.

Thanks for the advice on the hardware. Although I got the server with SBS 2008 in mind, I'll double check the grunt factor and increase if necessary.

exportgoldman

1202 posts

Uber Geek

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#208412 21-Apr-2009 18:42

bobmeister: My experience with SBS is installing SBS 2003 on 3 difference customer machines and reinstalling my own several times. This is my first go with SBS 2008, so its a new experience.

Thanks for the advice on the hardware. Although I got the server with SBS 2008 in mind, I'll double check the grunt factor and increase if necessary.

SBS2008 installation is actually very very simple, it asks from memory 4 questions, and then spends a hour or two churning away and then EVERYTHING is installed. It comes on one (or perhaps two) DVD's. I don't remember having to swap out disks for the basic version at least.

SBS does have Exchange 2007 which is very very different and for someone using Exchange 2003 it's basically learning the product from scratch but worth it, and the SBS wizards are much better and configure a lot more for you.

I've done over a hundred SBS installs. Sigh. :)

I would only worry about memory on your existing server, we are doing a minimum of 6-8GB especially with the 25 users you stated.

Hope all goes well, :-) use a temp machine/VM and you can take as long as you want to do the migration.

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

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slotherby

85 posts

Master Geek

#210440 29-Apr-2009 10:37

Be careful moving your user data to PST files and then importing into the'new' domain! As you are changing the SID for the user you can get some errors with appointments etc as the original user is seen as different from the 'new' user.

Also lots of RAM is essential, client with 25 user install has memory usage at around 8GB (10GB installed).

Noticeable performance difference using SAS drives over SATA, as well.