MS Migrations FTL! Ug.

usslindstrom · July 9th, 2009, 08:50 PM

I'm currently in the middle of a migration from a SBS 2003 environment, to a 2008 environment, with separated Exchange server.

This thread is nothing more than me ranting about it. It's not very pretty to say the least. From the extremely slow NTBackup / Restore (user shares and profiles) to having the SBS box continue to try and dominate the playing field even after grabbing the FSMO roles on the 2008 DC.

Exchange 2k7's been extremely painful (and yet to be working for me), but right out of the box Exchange (pre SP1) isn't supported on Server 2008 should say something about it.

THANKFULLY - there's places like this site, Experts-Exchange, and Technet to hit up the tortuous bits.

But boooo to MS for not having better support for their own products. It's a shame that the sites mentioned above are the backbone of anybody trying to accomplish a migration on their own products. **(I know Technet is theirs, but it seems like a 3rd party solution)**

vass0922 · July 9th, 2009, 10:25 PM

another good source
You Had Me At EHLO...

You can also check out Mark Minasi
MR&D: Home of technology writer and speaker Mark Minasi

I've never worked with SBS, I've heard good things.. but coming from an environment where we have redundant servers for everything.. I couldn't imagine having all resources on one box!
i've worked in a small environment before, but that was before I was actually responsible for anything important

usslindstrom · July 13th, 2009, 05:43 AM

Thanks for those resources Vass.

I really appreciate it.

Still having a small issue with Windows 7 Folder redirection (works fine for the XP clients)... But I'll work my way through it before too long. It'd be nice for MS to throw together a roaming profile wizard per-say that knocks out permissions, replication, etc. - I know the ADMT will do that sorta' stuff - but I haven't had too much success with that tool.

For SBS - the box has served it's purpose VERY well, and I have no complaints about it at all. The pains of this migration come from the lack of "options" through MS' own means. It's hard to explain, but what I was trying to key in on, was having to rely on 3rd party things for an internal migration of Windows platforms seems pretty odd to me.

You keyed the one thing that SBS was weak at, and that was all of that technology stuffed into one little package. I hear that they managed to allow 2 servers running SBS 2008 side/by/side for some redundancy now, but I'm "liking" the idea of having multiple redundant solutions for each one of my processes (Exchange, DC's, DNS, Web, SQL, etc.) - so if any one of those things fails, it really doesn't mean a whole lot of beans in the big picture.

Either or - the migration is still "in process" - so my Ug. continues.

vass0922 · July 13th, 2009, 07:32 AM

hell we're even geo-clustered on Ex2k3 which doesn't natively support geo-clustering

however, unfortunately in the somewhat near future I'll have to migrate 6k users/mailboxes/workstations to another domain via admt

booooooooooooo!

usslindstrom · July 16th, 2009, 04:51 AM

Well... F I N A L L Y got exchange up and runnin'. That was a beast and a half.

And I'm completely at a loss to why MS decided to pull the exchange tabs out of AD Users and Computers. For Ex2007, there is no integration, and you have to use the exchange management console if you want to create a mailbox for an end user. Seems kinda' odd to me, since it breaks out of the one-stop-shopping account creations that we're used to from before.

Good luck on your ADMT vass. I do nodda' like that tool so much.

I'm still having issues with roaming profiles in 2k8, even after following the microsoft article here: Security Recommendations for Roaming User Profiles Shared Folders: Group Policy so much so, that I've had to open yet another Experts-Exchange question on this topic.

Server 2008 Roaming Profiles not working

I'm standing by my "Ug" statement from before.