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)
 

I recently migrated a cus­tomer from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008. I’ve done a few of these. There is no in place upgrade as SBS 2003 is 32 bit and SBS 2008 is 64 bit. Because of this I’ve rec­om­mended to my cus­tomers to stay with 2003 until they replace their exist­ing hard­ware. The migra­tion is eas­i­est if you’re mov­ing to new hard­ware at the same time. This time I decided to give the Swing method from sbsmigration.com a try. I’d heard a lot of good things about it. Last year I met Jeff Mid­dle­ton, the owner, at an SBS event at Microsoft. I was impressed that the MS guys seemed to respect his deep knowl­edge of SBS. The Microsoft way is a series of doc­u­ments and help files that walk you through installing the new SBS 2008 server in migra­tion mode which joins it to the domain. Then in a series of steps you move Exchange, Share­point, user data, third party pro­grams, and every­thing else that’s on the old server over to the new server. Once this is com­plete you decom­mis­sion the old server and clean up active direc­tory. The Swing method is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. You cre­ate a third server, pro­mote it to a domain con­troller in the exist­ing SBS domain, then phys­i­cally remove it from the domain. You migrate from this tem­po­rary domain con­troller to SBS 2008. This allows you to use the same server name, IP address, and other set­tings that the old SBS 2003 server used. This can greatly ease migrat­ing some Line of Busi­ness appli­ca­tions. It also means you save a lot of time with the work­sta­tions. They essen­tially think it’s the same server only with Exchange 2007. With the Microsoft method you have to touch every work­sta­tion as the new server has a dif­fer­ent name and IP address.

To keep a long story short the Swing migra­tion worked great on the customer’s server. I did have a prob­lem when I ran a test migra­tion with my own SBS 2003 server. Here is where sbsmigration.com really kicked butt and why I now rec­om­mend it over the Microsoft way. Jeff’s sup­port was excel­lent. He was answer­ing emails within min­utes most of the time. Even on a week­end evening with him being in a time zone three hours ahead of me he was still answer­ing emails. The prob­lems I was expe­ri­enc­ing were totally of my own mak­ing. As this was just a test I took a few short­cuts. My SBS server has seen many exper­i­ments over the years. Just recently I was test­ing IPv6 and had removed IPv4 from it for a while, I’ve had Black­berry Enter­prise Server installed on it – things like that. The server is a bit of a mess let alone Active Direc­tory. Jeff was very patient and helped me through my prob­lems. I even­tu­ally gave up on the test migra­tion as I was run­ning out of time and I had learned enough to com­fort­ably go ahead with a live cus­tomer migra­tion. I picked up the customer’s server on a Fri­day after­noon and returned Mon­day with the new SBS 2008 server. It took 17 hours over Fri­day evening, Sat­ur­day, and Sun­day, then another five hours Mon­day at the customer’s site. It was by far the clean­est SBS 2003 to 2008 migra­tion I’ve done. Jeff’s doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to clean up Active Direc­tory both before and after the migra­tion is excel­lent. Sbsmigration.com – highly recommended.

Microsoft has a new ver­sion of Small Busi­ness Server which will be launched on Novem­ber 12. It’s called Small Busi­ness Server 2008. I was in the beta test­ing pro­gram for this and I’m quite excited about it. Sim­i­lar to 2003 there are two edi­tions, Stan­dard and Pre­mium. Stan­dard includes: Server 2008 64 bit, Exchange 2007 Stan­dard Edi­tion, Share­Point Ser­vices 3.0, WSUS 3.0, and all the stan­dard SBS fea­tures like RWW, as well as the stan­dard lim­i­ta­tions like 75 users max. Pre­mium adds a sec­ond full Server 2008 license (32 or 64 bit) and SQL Server 2008 Stan­dard. The Client Access Licenses (CALs) are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. There are dif­fer­ent CALS for the Stan­dard and Pre­mium Edi­tions with the Pre­mium CALs being a lit­tle more expen­sive. CALs are avail­able in mul­ti­ples of one rather than the min­i­mum of five in 2003. It is based on Server 2008 so by default it’s more secure than the pre­vi­ous ver­sion based on Server 2003. It is 64 bit only which means it can address more RAM, 32 GB vs. 4 GB for 2003. When 2003 was released RAM was expen­sive and 32 bit server OS’s were the norm. This is no longer the case. 4 GB can be a major choke point with a heav­ily loaded SBS server. The sec­ond server license in Pre­mium is a very nice addi­tion. This allows you to run SQL or what­ever on a sec­ond server rather than try­ing to run it all on the SBS server. Many Line of Busi­ness appli­ca­tions don’t sup­port run­ning on a domain con­troller which means they are not sup­ported run­ning on an SBS server. The sec­ond server is also capa­ble of run­ning Hyper-V, Server 2008’s vir­tu­al­iza­tion role. The sec­ond server is licensed to be installed as the par­ent and also as a child. This means you can install a decent server with lots of RAM, use the sec­ond server as the par­ent with the Hyper-V role enabled, and both SBS and another Server 2008 instance in child par­ti­tions (vir­tual machines). When I was beta test­ing SBS 2008 I did this and actu­ally had three child par­ti­tions. One of them was run­ning Untan­gle, an open source firewall/gateway. On a small net­work of 25 users a server with a cou­ple of decent Xeon CPUs and 16 GB of RAM could eas­ily run all of this on one box.
All in all SBS 2008 is a good prod­uct, well suited to a small busi­ness of ten to sixty users. If you grow beyond that you can migrate to the new Essen­tial Busi­ness Server 2008 or the full Enter­prise ver­sions of Server 2008, Exchange, SQL, etc. Kudos to the SBS devel­op­ment team for a great product.