THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Hello Susan,

Finally bit the bullet and miograted my sbsb 2003 standard to sbs 2010. Although my sbs 2003 server has seen some abuse in the past 4 years, migration went very smoothly and was concluded within 12 hours. Granted, it's a smaal setup with only 8 users, 6 of which only use email, but nevertheless migration seems a bit intimidating, especially if you look at the reems of paper dedicated to the process, yours especially...

What I came across in the field of gotcha's is not much, but worth noticing:

-As I mentioned, six users mainly use email, but with different domain names (family and friends). On the SBS 2003 they were set up to use only specific domains. After migrating I found out that,when the users were migrated, all users again had email addresses on all domains, using the main server domain as default email address. If you have a setup like this: make sure to check the users'email addresses in the AD users and computer manager and delete the unwanted emailaddresses.

-Secondly, I noticed that for pop3 access to the sbs 2010 server, the server prefers secured connections: make sure to inform remote users with pop3 access ahead of time about changing the settings in their email client!

-With my current setup, with myself as the main user, I hardly use  shares, everything is stored in My Documents, with offline folders turned on. The migration step that took the longest is the first time connection of the workstations/laptops with the new server in place. You wil see the welcome screen for a long time as folder replication starts right away the new location on the new server. If you have a main computer with a desktop that fills up with temepory downloads for clients and such, turn off replication of the Desktop in the SBS 2010 console, since you don't want that temporary stuff "which takes up half a 23"desktop to be replicated to your 12" traveling laptop's dektop.

Finally the main reason for the speedy migration is the fact that in november of 2010 I decided to build a new box, loaded it with Windows Server 2010 and started experimenting with HyperV. Followed by the decision to virtualize my existing SBS 2003 box. This went really well and the SBS 2003 server survived the transition without much trouble.

This decision made the migration path a lot easier in my case for three reasons:

First of all, I was able to upgrade hardware on the Windows Server 2008 box ahead of time (new mainboard to enable more memory, faster processor, new harddrives) without seriously affecting server availabilty.

Because the new SBS 2010 is also in HyperV, migration of active directory, users, email and data was blazingly fast because it was not limited by the speed of my physical network.

Finaly, the whole migration was done remotely from my main PC, RDP-ing to the Windows Server 2008 box. There has been no need to actually go anywhere near the physical box during the migration process. Being in the vicinity gives a more secure feeling, but basically, I don't see why the whole process could not have been completed rdp-ing over a VPN to a remote location.

I will seriously consider migrating some of my clients SBS 2003 boxes by virtualizing them first on new hardware and take the migration from there, backing up from withing the SBS server to an external harddrived and backing up the whole HyperV machine  from within server 2008.

All in all, the process went very smooth, largely because of your extensive en hands on documentation. Thanks!

Hi Susan,

It must have been a very lazy sunday... Of course I migrated to SBS 2011, not 2010.

Mark