How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

re: How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

David Overton — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:07:03 GMT

Jamie,

Did you install Hyper-V onto the SBS 2003 disk? if so, you will need to copy the install to another disk - it is not good enough to have it as a partition.

Thanks

David

re: How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

Jamie — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:47:24 GMT

Hi David -

Fantastic post and great thinking on the migration. I've been planning out my upgrade strategy and decided to test this approach, but I've hit a snag. When I attempt to offline the SBS 2003 OS disk in Hyper-V, diskpart complains that it can't take the disk offline because it is system parition. Any thoughts or direction?

Thanks

Jamie

re: How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

Brian Patton — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:10:00 GMT

I have an additional 2003 DC running on my network and wanted to repurpose the existing SBS 2003 hardware with SBS 2008.

My approach was to use VMware Converter and VMware Server 2 on the 2003 DC to virtualise the SBS 2003 machine. Then I installed Server 2008 with Hyper-V on the old SBS 2003 hardware and proceeded with the migration as per the SBS_Migration.doc installing SBS 2008 in a Hyper-V VM.

Naturally I could have just installed SBS 2008 to the physical hardware but wanted to try out SBS 2008 in Hyper-V.

The one thing I wasn't sure of that made me choose Server 2008 over Hyper-V Server as a host for the SBS 2008 VM was the need to use software RAID mirrors for the OS and VM partitions which I couldn't determine whether Hyper-V Server supports?

I'm very happy with the performance in general of SBS 2008 under Hyper-V. I look forward to Hyper-V R2 to complete the simplicity of backups.

re: How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

David Overton — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:53:46 GMT

Brian,

The hardware is the same. There is some reconfiguring and loading of drivers that happens, but to date when I've done this (about 4-5 times now) it has always booted. It loads new drivers for network, disk etc, but it has worked.

Of course, as they say, your miileage may vary - this is not guaranteed!

David

re: How to upgrade (migrate) from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 on the same system without using a swing migration

Brian Meehan — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:46:26 GMT

This sounds really intriguing, but what about the original SBS 2003 disks under Hyper-V? Doesn't it complain about hardware mismatches? Or worse, fail to boot?

Otherwise, I think it's an awesome solution!