Migration of Server & Exchange / Small Business Server

[Brian Cryer]

I would appreciate your thoughts on this:

We currently have an NT4 (BDC) server running our Exchange (5.5) server.
About half a year ago we added a Windows 2003 standard server to the domain
(before then the NT4 server was the PDC but it was demoted after we added
the 2003 server). What we would now like to do is to replace our rather old
NT4 server that holds our Exchange server with a newer box, running Windows
2003 server and Exchange 2003.

Cost wise, Small Business Server looks very attractive - its cheaper than
standard server and it includes Exchange 2003 (so on paper kit + software
comes in at about half the cost with SBS). My concern is given that SBS has
to be a domain master, would it be possible to migrate our existing domain
(users and computers) over to use SBS? or would I be looking at recreating
users and computers from scratch? or would I be saving myself a lot of
grief, time and agro by putting together a case to buy standard server +
exchange and dropping the idea of using SBS?

Your thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Brian.

 

[Cameron Dorrough]

Brian, remember that "you get what you pay for" - and this is certainly true
of SBS.

Since nearly everything you buy these days comes bundled with SBS, we have
several copies still sitting on the shelf. AFAIK, you can't directly
upgrade a multi-DC Win2k domain to SBS - at least not without quite a bit of
messing around. The easiest upgrade for you and your company will be to
full versions of Win2k3 - but that won't be the cheapest option.

Cameron

 

[Brian Cryer]

Thanks Cameron,

that's the conclusion I was coming to, but its nice to know there probably
isn't any way to upgrade our domain to SBS.

I'll put the order in for (the full) standard server + exchange.

thanks,

Brian.