I have successfully migrated sbs2003 w/exchange to 2008r2 w/exchange in a TEST environment.
I used Disk2VHD on the SBS 2003 box and did the migration in Hyper-V ( I had 3 days grace period on the SBS 2003 box)
Went fairly well, but I have a few questions.
We are a bit un-easy performing this migration from the live production server and hope to leave that server as-is in case we need to back out of the migration, we could just place the physical sbs 2003 server back in the rack and power it up and be back to square one.
We are moving the environment to virtual hyper V
1. Once I completely migrate the virtual SBS 2003 to virtual 2008r2, can I not just shut the old physical SBS box down, remove from network and introduce the new 2008r2 VHD running in hyper V to the network as the new DC/GC/Exchange. Isnt that similar or in fact a swing migration? I would be going through the entire migration including uninstalling exchange and transferring FSMO roles then shutting down the SBS box (all virtual)
I would like to perform this migration offsite ( we are 3rd party support for the company ).
2. If there are no problems with this approach, say it takes 5 days to complete the migration / before we introduce the new server. I would have migrated a 5 day old virtual of the SBS box and the physical box would have still been in production, what is the best approach to get the exchange data up to date?
(The physical SBS box is just the DC/GC and exchange..not a file server, and we make changes/add users to AD so the only data that would change during the 5 days would be exchange data.)
3. The other option we discussed was to clone the physical drives in the SBS box late friday, set them aside, then start the migration on the physical SBS box like a standard migration...if it fails, we can just replace the physical drives that we cloned and be back at square one.
Thoughts?