SBS 2003 Source Server Health is Critical

For a successful SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration, the health of the source server is absolutely critical to the success of the migration.

A number of things can be done to ensure we are starting off with a healthy SBS 2003 box:

• Verify that Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 have the current service packs installed.
• Run the SBS 2003 Best Practices Analyzer.
• Run the EBS Preparation and Planning Wizards.

The EBS wizards will look a lot deeper into the current SBS 2003 health and let us know whether there are any issues that may cause our migration to fail.

Always make sure to have a backup of the SBS 2003 source server prior to running any of the wizards or running any updates just in case.

Once into the process, make sure to have backups of both the source SBS 2003 and the destination SBS 2008 servers made before beginning each phase of the migration.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer