EBS/SBS Upgrades & Migrations

Recently I had several people ask me whether it is possible or supported to do a build to build migration or upgrade from the RC0 of either SBS or EBS to RC1 or even RTM. 

Migration and Upgrade are two words often used interchangeably.  Technically as you know they have some very specific meanings.  Upgrademeans to take the existing code base and then lay binaries over the top of, or underneath of (believe it or not this is how Vista does it!) the existing installation effectively taking the old installation and making it the new, whilst maintaining the existing configuration.   Migration means setting up a completely new environment and then transferring the settings, user data and  environment functionality to the new setup.

Upgrades are not something we design, test or develop for either SBS or EBS.  For RTM our research points to the fact that most installations have new hardware on site, and added to that the SBS architecture change from 32-bit to 64-bit prohibits us from doing in place upgrades. EBS is V1 so no upgrade requirement there.

This leaves migrations, I need to be very clear that it IS NOT SUPPORTED from any build to build.  Code can and does change from each of these milestones and we focus our resources on shipping a quality product for RTM.  Now that that's out of the way, let's cover if it's possible..

Yes it is possible to do such a migration.  We do this for our TAP customers using the same migration document that is on TechNET (we add some more details to it to cover the changes we make, but for the most part it is the same doc).  Both products have focused heavily on migration scenarios.  I'll break this into two sections to make it read easier.

Small Business Server 2008 Migration

Migration is one of the killer workloads for SBS 2008.  We've built so much from SBS 2003.  An SBS 2008 migration is based off of a domain join side-by-side configuration where you migrate the user accounts and settings from the old machine to the new using a 21 day trust we create.  It is also answer file based so you'll need to kick off the tool found in the SBS 2008 binaries.  You can read more by following the migration guide found here

Essential Business Server 2008 Migration

Now we anticipate that nearly *every* EBS customer will be migrating some data, so that means we very rarely will have a clean install.  Due to this fact we heavily test literally dozens upon dozens of scenarios for migration.  We've also created a clever installation wizard that walks you through planning and preparing your environment, setting up each of the servers, migrating data during this process and finally completing the migration with a series of post-setup tasks.  This also gives you flexibility to gradually migrate you environment across.  Although I have to admit I'm a fan for moving everything across as safely and quickly as possible.  You can check out the EBS migration guide out here

So what does this mean for you?  Well all of that time you used to spend doing migrations can be put towards other tasks.  Like implementing Windows SharePoint Services!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I saw over on Nicholas's blog post - Nicholas King : EBS/SBS Upgrades & Migrations that he has

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I was inspired by a partner who emailed me this week and said, 'The more bluntly you say "There