Migrate from sbs 2003 to sbs 2008 downtime?

[MCSLOY]

I am hoping someone out there has migrated from sbs 2003 to sbs 2008 and can share their experiances with me.

I have a customer who wishes to migrate to sbs 2008. He wishes that all the work is carried out over a weekend. I have not yet carried out a migration to sbs 2008 and was wondering is there much downtime during a migration? I have found 21 faults with the current sbs 2003 server and will fix these before i attempt the migration.One of the problems is that they use the pop3 connector and i will fix the current server so it uses exchange before we migrate.Forgetting the customer programmes the need to be installed on the new server, is it possible to migrate from a healthy sbs 2003 to sbs 2008 with little or no downtime? All comments,suggestions and any tips are most welcome!

 

[ShackDaddy]

Yes, it's possible, and not that difficult. I'd say you should count on it being around 10 hours total onsite time, although that number can shift depending on your experience level and what sort of things you run into. I recommend starting it on a Friday evening, kicking off the mailbox moves before leaving the building, and then coming back on Saturday morning to finish things up.

The SBS 2003 to 2008 migration can easily be done over a weekend, assuming no major hardware failures occur. The most time-consuming bit is the Exchange mailbox moves, but users are able to access their mail before and after their mailbox is migrated.

I would do the formal Microsoft SBS 2003 to 2008 migration: you just add the SBS 2008 box to the existing environment and then follow the migration wizard and documentation to get all the tasks accomplished.

Use ShadowProtect to take an offline image of the SBS 2003 server before starting. Shutdown the SBS 2003 server before imaging it from a ShadowProtect boot disk. That way if you don't like the way the migration went, you can easily roll back to how things were before you got started.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[MCSLOY]

Hi Dave

Many thanks for your reply.

What I was really wondering was if it was possible to carry out the migration during office hours. forgeting about any applications that need reinstalling,would this be possible with only a few restarts needed during the migration,causing very little disruption?

 

[ShackDaddy]

Yes, it would be possible to do that. Bringing up the SBS 2008 server and beginning to get all the configuration done is not disruptive to the existing environment. You may not need to ever restart the SBS 2003 box during the process.

There would be user email downtime when a user's mailbox is being migrated, but when you migrate mailboxes, not all of them migrate at once, so it wouldn't even be an office-wide outage.

Group Policy is used to remap network drives, so you won't need to touch the workstations. What you will need to do though is migrate the file shares over, and you don't want users making changes to them during that share migration interval.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[MCSLOY]

Hi Dave

Many thanks for that, Im just trying to avoid working the weekend!lol. Think I will start the job on a monday and let the mailbox move happen overnight. Will also use File server migration tool from microsoft which should save time.

Cheers

Martin

 

[ShackDaddy]

No prob, happy to help.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[markdmac]

Some added advice, when we did our migration we created an Excel spreadhseet with a list of all things that needed to be done. Then we were able to check them off as we accomplished milestones.

Get the 2008 box into the domain and take your time. Much of the migration can happen without affecting production. I'd save file and mail migration for last.

Work your way down the migration document and study it closely. If you use SharePoint you can get that up and running on the new server and running in parrallel if you can get people to agree not to add anything new to it.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

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[ascotta]

I am in the process of doing such.

The old server dies tomorrow, this afternoon I take its final backup and remove Exchange (manually cos the migration documentation really sucks) and demoting it.

I have managed to do the migration in production time with about half an hour of lost production. Due to re-boots.

[blue] A perspective from the other side!![/blue]

Cheers
Scott