HOT!! NEED TO MOVE AD FOREST/DOMAIN TO NEW SERVER HARDWARE 1

[ascore55]

I have been tasked with moving my Active Directory Forest to new servers, from Dell PowerEdge to HP Proliant Blades. I need to keep the Forest and Domain names the same.

The forest contains over 500,000 users and well over a million objects. I considered creating the domain from scratch, but would like to keep the user profiles for obvious reasons, not the least of which would be having half a million users having to change their passwords.

Directory Services Restore mode is a viable option, unfortunately that brings with it the System State (Dell hardware) along with Sysvol. This critically corrupts the HAL on the new HP Proliant Blade Hardware.

Let me know if any of you have any ideas.

Thanks in advance on this one.

 

[adcfaq]

u may use admt v2 to migrate password and user profile.

but, my question is: if u only want to switch h/w to HP blade, you don't need to do that, just demote DC and promo it on the new h/w, huh? u have at least 2DCs, right?

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Sr. Directory Services/Exchange Consultant

http://adcfaq.8m.com/

 

[rye8261]

Why dont you just add it to the domain as a dc, then give it a little time to replicate all the info and then just dcpromo the old servers out?

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http://www.hybridtown.com

http://www.ryesworld.com

 

[ascore55]

Definately a good call on both accounts. I should have prefaced my initial post by stating that I inherited this domain and its chock full o' errors from a failed Kerberos experiment last year. So I kind of wanted to start with a fresh and stable environment, but need to keep the Forest/Domain names the same as our web portal and all applications refer to it.

ADMT v2 is a good idea. I may experiment with a couple of admin accounts and see if it's password sync tool actually works.

 

[adcfaq]

in this case, admt v2 is one of chioce. password migrate is no brainer, check this out

http://www.petri.co.il/active_directory_migration_tool_usage_w2k_windows_2003.htm

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Sr. Directory Services/Exchange Consultant

http://adcfaq.8m.com/

 

[ascore55]

ADCFAQ,

That's a great article for migrating from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003, however I'm moving a Windows 2003 Forest to new hardware. A bit different, so some of the registry changes referenced in this article apply specifically to 2000. Do you know if there are any articles specific to moving users, RIDs, SIDs and passwords over?

 

[adcfaq]

2000 and 2003 are the same with regards to admt v2 and password migration.

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Sr. Directory Services/Exchange Consultant

http://adcfaq.8m.com/