IT Support Newcastle

Migrating SBS 2003 to SBS 2008

By Paul W. in Small business server | 19/07/2011

Following on from our last article regarding issues with SBS 2008, we thought it would also be useful to give our perspective on the SBS migration process.

You may have thought about migrating your SBS 2003 environment to SBS 2008.  And you may have planned it out thoroughly.  But there’s just a few simple things to be aware of to ensure it goes smoothly.

First off, you’ll want to download the Microsoft migration guide from here.

By following this guide, the migration is actually very straight forward: 

Some points to note

• SBS 2008 requires a 64-bit server – it doesn’t support a 32-bit processor architecture.
• If you have experience of SBS networks, you’ll know that you can only have 1 SBS domain controller existing in the domain.  However, when starting the new SBS 2008 setup in migration mode (and ONLY in migration mode) you can have 2 SBS domain controllers co-existing for 21 days (your old 2003 DC and the new 2008 DC).  After the 21 days grace period, the SBS 2003 server will shut down.

Some potential banana skins

You’re ploughing through the migration guide at a rate of knots, everything is going well, and you get to page 13 where a heading states

 “To demote a domain controller”

You think to yourself “Demote a domain controller?  Already?  Ok, well it says it in the Microsoft guide, so let’s go for it.  Let’s demote the source DC.”

STOP RIGHT THERE!!

The above scenario can easily happen, and we’ve seen it happen, if you don’t read the preceeding sentence in the migration guide.  The preceeding sentence tells you that you should demote a Windows 2000 Server DC if you have one.

Quite why Microsoft haven’t highlighted that bit I don’t know, as it is easy to miss for the novice.  No matter, it is certainly something to be aware of if this is your first migration.  Demoting the source server at this stage will cause you a major headache, and you’ll need to recover your backup of the source server.  You do have a backup, right?

Another key point that is often missed is to ensure that you log on to each of the client machines and open Outlook BEFORE you demote and remove the SBS 2003 Server DC from the domain.  This will update the mail server name in the mail profile, otherwise you will have to recreate each mail profile on each of the clients.  If there are a lot of client machines, you’ll want to make sure you don’t have this extra step to do.

We hope these tips prove useful to you.  Please click here to contact us if you would like advice on this or any related topic.