Windows Essential Server Solutions

Toes In The Water January 12, 2009

Well, it looks like we are finally getting our Small Business Server migration to Essential Business Server underway here at RoseBud Technologies. As I’m sure we will have lots of interesting observations, comments, and experiences to share as a result, I’ll do my best to give everybody in WWW-land a play-by-play of how everything happens. We have put a lot of time into planning on getting this thing working succesfully entirely running on top of Hyper-V, virtualizing nearly every aspect of the project.

After around a week or so of heavy-duty work on making ourselves, and the Planning and Preparation Wizards happy with our network topology here, we are ready to ‘pull the trigger’ so to speak on the migration and get the first part of the installation done by installing and joining the management server to our existing ActiveDirectory domain. I can now safely say after seeing this done at least once, that installation of the Management service into an existing online ActiveDirectory domain is not a problem at all. There were no network outages to anybody as a result of this process — there was some mild traffic while the installation wizard ran critical updates against the RTM disc, however everything was “business as usual” here at RoseBud Technologies from a connectivity standpoint while this occurred. I would even go so far as to say it was transparent enough where nobody would have known what we were up to had we not told them.

There are a lot of network address considerations to take into effect when deploying the EBS Management Server; in essence you are bringing three new machines online, and if they are coming into a pre-existing network there are a few considerations to take as far as properly addressing and naming everything. We opted not to move DHCP over to the Management Server upon installation to keep the migration as transparant as possible for now, we will be migrating DHCP and DNS as a part of the Guided Migration Tasks step upon completion of installing and joining the three machines. I want to provide a detailed post on that transition as opposed to adding it here. Moreover, in adding these servers to an existing domain, the Security Server will assume the role of the network gateway, with the addition of Threat Management Gateway as an integral aspect of EBS, this is a logical step, and I’m interested to see how it all fits together into an existing environment. Similar to the DHCP/DNS migration, we will be taking numerous notes and screenshots in regards to this process and sharing our experiences through this site.

All things considered, installation, and joining of the Management Server to our existing ActiveDirectory domain was straight-forward, easy, and only took approximately two hours. The level of user input is not extremely involved, however, like any migration of this scope, the best caveat I can give is have a clear understanding of how you want everything to look during the process of introducing these servers one-by-one. Should you stray from the path, you will always have an idea of how to get back.