KDB Systems

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)