KDB Systems

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.