[sdw2003] NT to W2K3 AD migration questions

[James Eitzen]

How many users to you currently have in AD?

Are you deploying new hardware at all?

And the kicker! Have you considered 2008 domain functionality?

Depending on the size and complexity of your currently deployment, it may be
work considering building a new domain. I had to do one of these recently
and I am soooo glad I went with building a new domain.

This also gives you a chance to whack anything wacky. This of course assumes
you have nuaunces you want to get rid of, the worse is going through all the
work of a upgrade and crap follows from the old config.

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Doug Sampson <dougs at dawnsign.com> wrote:

> I am planning a migration from a NT domain to a W2K3 AD domain. Long
> overdue.
>
> I am debating going with an in-place upgrade versus creating a two-way
> trust
> between the NT domain and a new AD domain. We have three NT 4.0 SP6 servers
> (two of them are PDC/BDCs) and four W2K/W2K3 member servers along with
> seven
> FreeBSD servers using Samba. We also want to upgrade Exchange 5.5 to Exch
> 2003. I've identified all or most relevant materials to study and prepare
> for the migration. A few questions remain.
>
> One, when I last looked into this a while ago during the W2K Server days,
> one of the issues with an in-place upgrade using an existing NT domain
> controller was that you couldn't specify an AD domain name. They would take
> whatever was your NetBIOS domain name and attach a ".com" to it. Is this
> still true for the in-place upgrade to W2K3 AD? I'm inclined to do an
> in-place upgrade only if I can specify an AD domain name of my choice.
>
> Two, assuming that the in-site upgrade goes well, can I completely transfer
> all domain controller functions from these aging domain controllers to new
> machines? I vaguely seem to recall something about difficulties migrating
> certain domain controller functions (global catalog comes to mind) to other
> domain controllers.
>
> Three, I looked at the system requirements for upgrading Windows servers to
> W2K3 servers. The aging NT domain controllers appear to meet all
> requirements except for one- available 1.5 GB of free space on the OS disk.
> Does anyone know if the upgrade routine is extremely picky about this?
>
> Four, how easy is it to migrate printer drivers and printer shares from a
> NT
> server to a W2K3 server? I looked at printmig.exe version 3.0 and that seem
> to indicate it was quite easy to do so. Comments, anyone?
>
> I may have more questions later on but the ones listed here are the more
> relevant ones. Any other gotchas I may need to know?
>
> ~Doug
>
>
>
>
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-- 
James Eitzen