Freigeben über

Migrating Away from Small Business Server - Introduction

  • Artikel

So your company has grown beyond 75 users and now you want to break free from the limitations (!) of Small Business Server. This being one of the most frequently asked questions on SBS Forums, with mixed feelings (Since SBS is a product close to my heart), I'd like to outline a general procedure to migrate away.

Migration can be classified as :

1. You want to introduce the standard / enterprise products in your current domain and remove SBS.

2. You have a new domain (already set up) and you want to move users and computers, essentially using the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT).

I will address these two scenarios in the upcoming blogs. There can be a number of permutations and combinations, once you are heading towards a standard environment but the basic principle remains the same.

There are some thumb-rules to any migration involving a Small Business Server:

1. You cannot take off FSMO roles and Global Catalog from SBS for more than 7 days.

2. Once an SBS Server is demoted, you cannot use it as a member server. If you wish to use the hardware, you must reinstall the Operating System to a standard server product.

3. You can have as many domain controllers as you want in an SBS Domain as long as SBS has FSMO and GC roles.

In my next blog, I will talk about migration from Small Business Server to a Windows 2008 Server with Exchange, while retaining the current domain name.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2012
    Swing Migration ZDTM (Karl Palachuk)

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2013
    I am really curious about option # 2 using ADMT to migrate users and computers to a new domain. As I can see SBS 2008 doesn't allow you to create a trust so I don't see how this is possible, is there a way around this?