SBS Migration - What it can do for you

Folks, we can't say this enough: Please, Please, Please stop by Jeff's Web site: SBSMigration.com and pick up a subscription!

Why?

Because, when it comes to professional skills development, you are going to receive a return on your investment that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Investment ... we hear about that and see the spam in our inboxes on a regular basis. However, an SBS Migration subscription is just that: An investment in your company and employee's futures.

Here are some of the many ways that investment will pay dividends:

• SBS 2008 (Cougar) that will not have an in-place upgrade
• Performing Swing Migrations will prepare you for what is to come
• Bringing an existing SBS domain over to new hardware with little or no AD domain impact
• Ability to take an existing SBS domain off the existing hardware and Swing it back onto that existing hardware
• Ability to tailor out Active Directory messes during the Swing process
• That day when Exchange dies a death unknown to any before ...
• SBS integration into an existing Server 2003 AD domain with Exchange
• Users not knowing their server changed last night or over the weekend! ;)
• Generating Disaster Recovery scenarios and how to actually recover from them

There are so many ways that the Swing method has helped us out. It has been one of the best investments we have made in SBS related product tools.

Once the subscription is in hand, use ShadowProtect to transfer your production SBS domain onto some lab hardware via Hardware Independent Restore and start Swinging It! Using ShadowProtect means no impact whatsoever on the production SBS AD domain and gives us the opportunity to practice our Hardware Independent Restore skills. ;)

We suggest working with physical hardware, especially when Swinging between hardware configurations, or Swinging off a piece of hardware and back on again, to give one a better perspective on how the Swing will behave across the various server hardware configurations we work with daily.

This situation also presents an opportunity to utilize the various new and old hardware systems around the shop. When we receive new server configurations that are not slated for delivery until a week or more down the road, we can "burn in" that box on a couple of Swing Migrations. This gives us an excellent view on how SBS will behave on that new configuration.

While working with virtual SBS environments can do the job, virtual machines are not necessarily the best path to take here. System drivers and utilities, among other factors, also present variables that can impact the success or failure of a Swing Migration.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.