The first phase of the process was to get the production server off of the hardware. I implemented a temporary Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 machine to act as a virtual host running Hyper-V. Then I created a virtual hard drive (.vhd) copy of the production server using the Sysinternals tool Disk2VHD. Once the virtual hard drive was created and copied over to the Hyper-V server, I created a new virtual server and attached the virtual hard drives to the server and booted it up. After resetting the network interface I tested all email and data access successfully. With the physical production server still running, but unplugged from the network, I had the users run off the virtual SBS2003 server for a full day before starting the installation process.
The second phase of the process was to install additional memory into the physical server and install SBS2008 in migration mode using the unattended answer file. Once the answer file was created and placed on the root of a flash drive I started the installation. After the server was installed I started the migration process using the Migration Wizard in the SBS Console. The next step was moving Exchange mailboxes and client data from the old server to the new, that was performed remotely during the evening hours. I had previously created an RDP rule that would allow me access to the server. The following day I verified that email flow was running properly to and from the new server, as well as the clients having access to their data shares.
The final process was installing and migrating over the remaining items from the source server to the destination server, things like antivirus management consoles, printers, and additional data. After a few days of running successfully on the destination server, the source server was demoted, Exchange was removed, and it was maintained as a member server due to an application that was not supported on the new Server Operating System.
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