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Migrate to a new server with a new domain

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Hi,

i will have to migrate between 2 servers (win server 2003) but each one has got a different domain.

the old one which i want to transfer the data from has SQL & exchange 2003 which i need to migrate (both).

could you please let me know what would be best for my case.

thanks alot for reading this.

Meq

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to Migrate to a new server with a new domain

Clarifications

Tools

In reply to Migrate to a new server with a new domain

1. For users and groups, you can use ADMT (Active Dir Migration Tool) from Microsoft.

2. For SQL, you can use SQL Enterprise to backup the databases to a file and restore it on the new server.

3. For Exchange you can use the InterOrg tool or ExMerge to export/import mailboxes etc

What about the different domain name

In reply to Tools

Thanks alot for the reply..

what about if i will be having different domain at the other server? that wouldn’t work, would it?

ADMT

In reply to What about the different domain name

ADMT v3 will migrate your users, computers and groups to a new domain name. I used it to consolidate 2 domains into one new name. Works once you get the permissions correct. When Microsoft says local Administrators group in the new domain, they man the Administrators group in the domain, not domain admins and not a local group. Just Administrators. I ended up doing a support call to Microsoft because of this wording in their documentation.

what about domain rename?

In reply to ADMT

thanks alot for the reply, you made me confident when you said that you had tried it. do you recommend domain rename?

It depends

In reply to what about domain rename?

It depends on your reasons for a domain name change. If it is to shorten the name, then ya. When I came to this company we had a domain name that was sitea.companyname.com and siteb.companyname.com for example. So we shortend it to just companyname.com. So much easier on email addresses, server addressing and troubleshooting.

Another reason to change is just looks. It depends really on how much work you want to do. ADMT will all have to be done after hours, when no users are logged into the workstations. Even then, there will be a percentage of computers that didnt migrate properly. In my case we had a lot of PCs that were Windows 200 before and upgraded to XP. These were problem childs.

WHAT ABOUT..

In reply to It depends

what about if i am chnaging from domain “ALEP” to “ALP”, i will take one letter off. in addition that the domain is local domain i.e. ALP.local

would that help?

Retro probably suggested the best way to do your migration

In reply to WHAT ABOUT..

you can rename domains but… see this article

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/f69f4788-fd22-4b90-b54a-7cecb520e5241033.mspx?mfr=true

if you have new hardware and are installing Windows Server 2003 from scratch, follow Retros suggestions using ADMT. It works well.

ok

In reply to WHAT ABOUT..

You can certainly do that. I dont know where this .local came from but its not required.

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