Windows Server 2003 upgrade

[bigmouk]

Just after some advice/thoughts on a server upgrade im going to be doing. I have 5 x Win 2000 servers and im looking at upgrading them all to Win 2003 for various reasons. I have a spare server sat here doing nothing that im playing around with. Ideally i want to totally reinstall each server from fresh (recreate raids is a main reason because some have been updated in the past with extra drives etc) but obviously try keep everyone online with access to files (approx 40 users). I guess it wouldnt be such a big deal recreating user accounts if needed.

Just wondering what other peeps thoughts would be in this situation ?

 

[MikeDX]

Would SBS be a smarter move. Although saying that, the real smart move would be Linux servers, and pocket the windows server license money

 

[McBunny]

no sbs is a bad bad bad move

all your stuff on one box no ta

 

[TheCake]

SBS is evil.

 

[MikeDX]

I should just point out that I was ASKING whether SBS would be a good move. I just forgot to add the ?

 

[sh33n]

What are the reasons for upgrading?

If there's no business purpose is there any need?

 

[TheCake]

It says various reasons which I'd understand to "mind your own".

LOL.

 

[Daz]

SBS is a superb choice for offices which need a single server..

If you have more than one server, it's a bad choice.

 

[sargey]

Are the servers in an AD domain?

 

[McBunny]

oh and dont use sbs if you need to talk to another domain or actually do anything usefull

 

[clio172cup20]

I Would go for a BSD Distro, Maybe OpenBSD if you know how to use it, its stable, Very secure and.... easy(ish) to use.
Oh... And its FREE!! http://www.openbsd.com

 

[Evil Ally]

If it's just rejigging the raid setup then there are ways to do this without data loss, but perhaps you have other reasons

If they are all part of one domain, then promote another server to be a domain controller. You can then replicate all of your AD stuff to this server and take the other one down. Once it's upgraded replicate again and you should have all your stuff back, hopefully without anyone noticing!

If they are all separate domains, then run your spare up and use that as a secondary domain controller for each upgrade.

If I'm doing anything that could potentially go tits up, I run through it with VMware first.

 

[bigmouk]

Not going for sbs for the reasons above (One goes pear shaped and you only have 1 main service to worry about.) + I dont want to use exchange + one of the dell servers doesnt like 2000 with some updates after sp4 + I use windows backup with DLT drives and one of them isnt playing ball anymore. I have 2 servers as file servers, 1 web server, 1 mail server and 1 backup server.

Dont want to go down the linux or BSD route because i dont have any real experience with it + i develop quite a lot of apps on windows server platform.

I was thinking what evil ally has suggested by basically joining a 2003 server to the existing domain, move the services of one existing 2000 server to that, take the 2000 server down and upgrade to 2003 and move all the services back. I would then end up with all servers in the existing domain but as 2003 after all 5 upgrades. Does anyone think there could be problems doing that way?

Is it wise to setup AD on the first 2003 server and transfer operations master role to it ?