SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 3)
Preparing to move DHCP
As part of the project I have to move the DHCP server from the SBS server to a new server. With Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise you get what is called one plus four licensing. You can install it on physical hardware. That’s the one license. If this installation is only used as a Hyper-V parent you can then install four child partitions with the same license. So far I’ve used two of these licenses, one for the domain controller and one for the future Exchange server. I want to run a Terminal Server for the third license. This leaves me with one spare license. I plan to experiment with Direct Access so I’ll probably need the last license for that. Long story short, DHCP would have to go on one of the existing servers. I decided to put it on the domain controller. During the changeover I’ll be running DHCP on the SBS server and the new domain controller. The reason for this is one or the other may be down for a while when making changes. This isn’t normally a big deal as long as none of the existing leases expire or no new computers get connected to the network. My problem is I have many different computers coming and going. I may have customer computers I’m working on that would need a new lease. This means two DHCP servers. I installed The DHCP server role on the new domain controller, configured both the existing DHCP on the SBS server and the new DHCP with the same scope but different exclusions so they wouldn’t be trying to give out the same addresses. Once finished I authorised the new DHCP server in Active Directory and logged off. The next morning there was a surprise waiting for me in the daily SBS report. One service was not running. I logged on to the SBS server and saw that DHCP was not running. I’d forgotten one of SBS’s quirks. If another DHCP server is running it will shut down its own DHCP server. A quick Bing/Google search found the registry change and all was well with DHCP running on both servers. One more checkpoint done on the migration from SBS 2003 to Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.
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)