upgrade small business server 2003 including exchange

[rbby2003]

I have a client who wants to upgrade to Windows Small Business server 2003 from Windows Small Business server 2000, Active Directory and exchange server are on the 2000 machine. Before and after upgrade,everything will be on the same machine, in-place upgrade. The only thing I can find that is really useful on Microsft is

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sbs/2003/plan/gsg/chptr3b.mspx

But it does not really talk about exchange upgrading from 2000 to 2003, although it does mention server applications installation. Does someone have any experience doing this upgrade?

Any idea will be appreciated.

Robert

 

[dkediger]

Really shouldn't be too much of a problem. SBS upgrade from 2000 to 2003 does the Exchange upgrade as well. I've had several, and haven't had any problems with the Exchange portion.

If you do have an AV product that is hooked into Exchange, be sure they are compatible with Exchange 2003, and I would probably uninstall it first and then reinstall it after the upgrade.

 

[TheCandyman]

From my experience, make sure that machine is fast and tons of ram. The last server i did was an upgrade from 2000 to SBS 2003. things went well. had an issue with the AV and the backup software. Make sure you do that AV last. That server had 2 Gig ram, and it runs maxed out on ram because of SBS. exchange is a memory hog, no, there is not a memory buffer overflow or memory leak, it's just a pig. plus ISA and proxy all running together sucked up all 2 gig of ram. things run well, but they could run faster with more ram.

Overall, Just back everything up first and it's a snap! (bad past experiences)

 

[rbby2003]

dkediger, TheCandyman,

I sure appreciate your input.
Do I have to run adprep/forestprep, then adprep/domainprep on the machine before I upgrade since it is not mentioned in the Microsoft article?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sbs/2003/plan/gsg/chptr3b.mspx

And then just follow the SBS setup?

This is for a small office, only 1 server and another company set it up for them. I need to do an in-place upgrade today.

I will let you know how it goes.

 

[rbby2003]

The in-place upgrade did not work.
The windows 2000 did not take the upgrade since the Windows Small Business Server 2003 is a OEM version. I installed Windows SBS 2003 and Service Packs and moved info from 2000 to 2003. It took around 5 hours to finish the installation of Windows Small Business Server 2003.