[sdw2003] NT to W2K3 AD migration questions

[Bob]

Hi Doug,

I find it hard to believe that any NT box would meet any of the   
Win2k3 requirements, much less the free disk space!?!? I'm not   
sure how well Win2K3 will run on a P-III 800Mhz system...... 

I personally would go with a fresh install on a fresh box so you   
won't have all that "luggage" that has been accumulating all these   
years.  I'm making a few assumptions of course.......but how long    
have these NT systems been in operation???  How many users are we   
taking about??? I didn't see any mention of "SBS" so we can assume   
these will be Standard Servers with full-blown Exchange???

Use the Exmerge program to get your email boxes off of the old   
server and onto the new one......use "addusers.exe" to export your   
user accounts and imported into the new box. Biggest problem I see    
is joing the workstations to the new domain and recreating the user's   
profiles, but that isn't even that big of a deal to accomplish. With   
new server boxes, you can still have the old ones lingering until   
you get all of the little problems resolved, or in a worst case   
scenario, you have to put them back online until you get the major   
problems worked out need to buy some time.............

good luck

-bob


-----Original Message-----
From: sdw2003-bounces at mattware.com [mailto:sdw2003-bounces at mattware.com]
On Behalf Of Doug Sampson
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 5:41 PM
To: 'sdw2003 at mattware.com'
Subject: [sdw2003] NT to W2K3 AD migration questions

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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