SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 1)
In 2004 a customer asked me to quote on setting up a product called Windows Small Business Server. I had never heard of the product but I had a good knowledge of Active Directory and Windows Server 2000 so I submitted a quote. Investigating the product while doing the quote I was intrigued by the value it provided. It included Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003, Sharepoint, Outlook 2003, and something I’d never heard of called Remote Web Workplace. I’d noticed it was included with my Microsoft Action Pack subscription so I decided to play around with it. Long story short, I really liked it, installed it for my own use, and started selling it to customers. I’m still running it on the computer I originally tested it on. It’s woefully underpowered with a Pentium IV single core 1.6 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, a single 10/100 NIC and three IDE hard drives, not exactly ideal for a server that’s a domain controller, file server, and Exchange server. Despite this it’s been happily chugging away for almost seven years now. Most of my customers have moved on to SBS 2008. I have a couple of customers bumping up against the 75 user limit in SBS. I was going to migrate them to Essential Business Server 2008 as it has a 300 user limit. Microsoft very recently discontinued EBS so this went out the window. They are going to have to migrate to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. There’s not a lot of documentation (if any) of this online that I can find. SBS Migration who sell documentation and support packages for many Windows and Exchange migration scenarios doesn’t support this yet. If you are doing any kind of Exchange or Active Directory migrations I highly recommend SBS Migration. Hopefully they’ll support this scenario in the future. For now I’m on my own. I’m going to migrate from SBS 2003 on my old woefully underpowered server to Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. I will be using another underpowered server I purchased off eBay for this. I’ve been using it as a Hyper-V test bed. I’m going to repurpose it for my production server. This is probably a really bad idea but it’s on hand and I don’t need to lay out any cash. Like most small business owners cash for new equipment is always in short supply. It’s a 1U Dell SC1435 with two Opteron 2350 2GHz Quad Core CPUs and 16GB RAM. I installed Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition and setup the Hyper-V role. Dell 1U servers are very noisy. I moved the server out to the tool shed. I’ll be using RDP and vmconnect for the rest of the setup. So far I’ve installed a Windows 7 vm for my accounting with Simply Accounting and a Server 2008 R2 Enterprise vm. I’ve joined the 2008 R2 vm to the domain and promoted it to a Domain Controller. So far I haven’t run into any performance issues. I’m pretty sure I’ll run into IO issues eventually as there’s only room for two hard drives in the server and I didn’t opt for the expense of SAS drives. There’s only two gigabit NICs which may also become an issue. If the drive IO becomes an issue I guess I’ll have to look at a home built SAN. That’s the beauty of virtualization. It’s easy to change out the hardware as the virtual machines don’t interact directly with the hardware. If the lack of NICs becomes an issue I have one slot where I could install a 4 port NIC. I’m not sure where to proceed next. I think the best path would be to install another 2008 R2 vm and install Exchange 2010 on it then migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2010. There’s quite a bit of documentation on this so I should be able to muddle through. Once I’ve got Exchange migrated I’ll move DHCP and all the FSMO roles to the 2008 R2 DC and decommission the old SBS 2003 server. If the performance isn’t suffering too much I’ll probably add another 2008 R2 vm as a file server. I’m sure there will be a lot of AD cleanup involved afterwards. SBS has a lot of peculiar stuff in AD to make everything work on one box. I don’t plan on doing all this overnight. It’ll probably take a month or more. I’m sure there will be a few detours along the way as well as doing some work for paying customers. I’ll blog about the steps I take, problems I encounter, and more so stay tuned.
UPDATE: Jeff Middleton of SBS Migration contacted me to let me know they do support this and other custom migration paths. Here’s what he said:
“SBSmigration.com has not yet released a standard Swing It!! Kit specific to this migration path, but does provides support with many variations of project already documented. In this case, this project is a custom project variation of the 2003 to SBS 2008 project solution. If you are interested in a Swing Migration path and support on any project you have in mind, you should contact SBSmigration.com for specific details.”
This is very good news. I’m still going to try this on my own as a learning experience. I think this migration scenario may become more common now that EBS is no longer sold. If I do this for a paying customer I will definitely be using SBS Migration.
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 1)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 2)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 3)
SBS 2003 to Windows SErver 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 4)