Friday 5 June 2009

SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 Migration Stall – Update – A Little More Confidence Now

We have put a lot of time into a failed SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration.

We have since initiated a support incident with Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS). We spent about 4 hours working with the first support engineer which lead us nowhere.

Needless to say, there was not a lot of confidence going into the second round that was an escalation from the previous day when we were contacted by PSS yesterday.

We did not want to burn another 4 or more hours, it ended up being the whole day, babysitting the PSS remote session and come to a point where we were no further ahead.

It is very important to note that in this case we were able to have a ShadowProtect image sent up to us and we were able to restore that image on a server here and replicate the error by running the migration process on our lab servers.

Why is that important?

Because, when we finally spoke to Edwin at the end of yesterday’s seemingly nonproductive support session and expressed frustration with the situation, he came around and explained what they were able to discover by being able to DCPromo the SBS 08 box out of the SBS 03 domain and DCPromo it back in again.

The lab has provided the support team with unfettered access to the problematic domain without impacting productivity on the production SBS domain! And, as a result, they were better able to pinpoint what they think is the source of replication errors between SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 by DCPromoing .

This morning, in my discussion with Edwin as we began the next round of troubleshooting, I mentioned my MVP status and he asked me if I had heard of his recent document on SBS 2000 to SBS 2008 Migration (document download page)!

Edwin Anthony Joseph (his blog) is the lead engineer that we are working with. And yes, I mentioned that I have heard and read his document and that it is an excellent methodology for migrating from SBS 2000.

So, today, Edwin is working with some additional team members that are tied into Active Directory and replication. Hopefully, by the end of today we will have the source of the problem and the steps needed to fix it on the actual source SBS 2003 network!

Needless to say, we are a lot more confident that we are going to come through this with a positive result.

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

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