Posts Tagged ‘Migration’

Windows Server 2012 Essentials Migration Documents

Friday, December 7th, 2012

I was searching for a list of all the current resources on migrating to Windows Server 2012 Essentials – I finally found them on Microsoft.com.  Sadly I could not locate much in the downloadable versions of these documents, but I’ll update this later once I do find them.

Migrate Windows Small Business Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Migrate Windows Small Business Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Migrate Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Migrate Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Migrate Windows Server 2008 Foundation to Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Migrate Windows Server 2012 Essentials to New Hardware

Transition from Windows Server 2012 Essentials to Windows Server 2012 Standard

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

Oh how quick we forget SBS 2003

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Our team is migrating around 2x SBS 2003 servers as week right now over to SBS 2011 Standard.  We’ve gotten pretty darned good at it but every now and then something stops you dead in your tracks.  Today one of the guys was onsite doing part of the preflight check on a migration.  As part of that we need to revert the server from a 2 NIC configuration with ISA as the firewall to a single NIC configuration.  He did this and rebooted the server as planned.  However after the reboot we found that there were issues.  Users could not do DNS, they could not get an IP via DHCP or anything like that at all.  After scratching our heads for a bit we finally remembered something we long forgot now… the Scalable Network Pack that Microsoft deployed as part of Windows Server 2003 SP2 was the problem.  It’s been at least 5 years since I’ve seen an issue caused by this and for some reason the patch that Microsoft released to disable these features on SBS was not applied to this server.  The patch I’m talking about is this one http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496.  After we applied this and rebooted – everything was fine.

I’ve got to say though… it’s been a while since I’ve seen this issue.  You can bet that a check for this patch is now part of our server build/migration documentation for sure!

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »

No Exchange servers are available in any active directory sites during migration

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Doing an a migration today from Exchange 2003 to 2010 and once I’ve installed the Exchange 2010 server, I rebooted and logged back on to it.

I got the following error “No Exchange servers are available in any active directory sites.”

image

After a little investigation, I realised that I was logging on with the local administrator account rather than the domain administrator account.  Doh!!!

Log off and back on using the RIGHT domain account and it works fine now!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Desktop to Cloud Event

Saturday, April 7th, 2012

Robert Crane has come up with another training offering, this time focused on the desktop to cloud migration.  He’s launched the event which will be held in May (that’s just next month!)

This event will consist of two tracks, one for consumers and one for IT Professionals and will provide the latest information on desktop software like Windows 8, Office 2010 as well as information about cloud technologies such as Office 365 and Windows Intune. It will be provided by a range of speakers and include all meals, parking and WiFi access.

Date: Saturday 19th of May 2012

Time: 8.30am to 5.30pm

Tracks: A = Consumer, B = IT Professional

You can find out more about the event and register for it here www.desktoptocloud.com.au

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

“ConfigureSharePointDatabaseTask: Microsoft SharePoint Foundation is not configured” during SBS 2003 to 2011 Migration

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

When doing the SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 migration, make sure you have the latest version of the document and ALWAYS review the document in full.

Microsoft made a recent change in the documentation which included a step designed to get around this issue – it’s documented on Page 17 where you need to give the built in administrators group the right to logon as a batch job.  If you have not done this then you will get the error listed in the title of this post.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

How can I tell how many days I have left to do my SBS 2011 Migration?

Monday, October 24th, 2011

It’s easy to lose track of how long you’ve taken to do a migration, particularly if you have multiple projects running at the same time.  Lucky for us in SBS 2011 Standard, Microsoft have an easy way to know how many days left you have to do the migration before the SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 server will shutdown automatically.

Firstly – you need to know that you have a maximum of 21 days to do the migration from the point at which the SBS 2011 server is built into the existing SBS network.  Once that limit is reached, your SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 server will shutdown automatically to prevent you from violating the license agreement.

To see how many days left you have in the migration, you can do the following.

  1. Open the Migration Wizard from the SBS 2011 console
  2. On the left hand pane of the Home tab, you will see the Getting Started Tasks section.
  3. Double click the Migrate to Windows SBS link and open the SBS 2011 Migration wizard.
  4. In the lower half of the screen you will see a section listing the following text

“You must finish the migration within X days of beginning the installation.  After X days, the source server shuts down, and it continues to shut down after about an hour each time you restart it.”

X of course will be the number of days you have left to finish the migration.

What happens if you have problems with the migration and need more than the 21 days Microsoft have allowed?  Well legally there is no way around this.  If you are having issues completing the migration within 21 days, then you need to contact Microsoft for assistance on fixing whatever problem you are having that is preventing you from getting it done in time. 

Tags: , ,
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »

SBS 2011 Migration Tool Updated

Friday, October 21st, 2011

Microsoft this week have released an update for the SBS 2011 Migration tool that ships on the SBS 2011 DVDs.  This tool takes into account more then a dozen additional checks that need to be done prior to a migration to ensure that the smooth migration form SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 to SBS 2011 Standard.  It’s quick and easy to get the update, when you run the Migration Tool on your SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 server before you commence the migration, simply allow it to check for updates and the tool will bring the updates down and then perform the checks on your machine.

The SBS team has a blog post about the tool here

You can also find out more information about the specific checks done by the tool and the corrective actions needed here

This update is a MUST for any migration you are doing as well as reading the SBS Team blog – you can use this link to quickly check the Migration category for migration issues on SBS 2011 migrations.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Object Not Found when moving mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Recently when doing an SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 Standard migration, I had an error of “Object not found” in the Local Move Request screen as you can see below.

image

I did some digging and found that the permissions on the SBS 2003 / Exchange 2003 mailbox store had been changed for some third party application. 

Too fix it do the following,

  1. Open Exchange System Manager on the Exchange 2003 server.
  2. Expand the nodes until you get to the First Administrative Group and then expand the Servers node.
  3. Right click on the Exchange 2003 / SBS 2003 server and select properties
  4. Go to the Security tab and select the Advanced Button
  5. Select to enable the “Allow inheritable permissions…” box as below
  6. image
  7. Then Select OK twice to apply the changes.
  8. Restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store on the Exchange 2003 / SBS 2003 server and re run the move request on the Exchange 2010 / SBS 2011 Standard server once again.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 Migration Tip – Moving Mailboxes

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

In previous versions of Exchange, the move mailbox process was a pretty “dumb” process.  You selected the mailboxes you wanted moved and then moved them either immediately or at a later time you selected.  You had to leave the console running for the process to run.

Exchange 2010 / SBS 2011 Standard changes all that now.  With the moving of mailboxes, when you select the mailboxes to move, you issue a Local Move Request for the selected mailboxes.  This then puts those mailboxes into a Move Request Queue which is a serviced by the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service.  This service then processes the mailboxes in the order that they were placed in the queue moving them from server to server.

The cool thing about this is that you can grab a group of mailboxes in whatever order you desire to move them in  a specific order.  For example, on a recent migration, I used the Exchange 2003 console to identify which mailboxes were below 500MB, and then I used the Exchange 2010 console to multi select those and process a Local Move Request against those mailboxes.  This started the move on those smaller mailboxes and I was able to then select all the larger mailboxes and add them to the Move Request queue.

I love it when Microsoft make cool improvements like this – makes our life as IT Professionals easier.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 – RBAC Errors

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

In a mixed Exchange 2007 and 2010 environment, when trying to access a the Role Based Authentication in Exchange 2010, you might get the error below.

image

I found that this was due to the mailbox for my admin user being still located on an Exchange 2007 server.  I used the move mailbox wizard to move it over to the Exchange 2010 server and everything worked fine.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »