Okay, I need some advice. Back in the late 90’s early 00’s, I worked in IT and I was NT 4.0 certified, but I left the IT world around the time Active Directory started really appearing at my workplace, so I only have limited understanding of changes since Server 2000. So, I know enough to really screw everything up! I need help though:
I have a single server domain running MS Small Business Server 2003 and running Exchange 2003 with a static IP address. I need to replace/upgrade the server so the hardware is totally different.
What I want to do is:
1-Build the new server and join it to the domain (I have already done this part)
2-make the new server the Domain controller (I already read on here how to do this – but I have questions)
3-migrate our proprietary database over to the new server (I can handle this too)
4-migrate exchange over (HELP!)
5-give the new server the old server’s static ip address and shut down the old server.
I really, really want to avoid having to re-create the user profiles and, consequently, reconfigure all the clients because that is really time consuming and we lost peoples data last time this happened.
Thing that I want to try: I want to try doing a clean install of Exchange on the new server and then just copy over the settings and files from the old server, essentially just overwriting the settings. Things like that used to work in the old days, will it work with Exchange ’03?
Thing that scares me: All our user’s desktops and documents are stored on the server, will this migrate automatically when I make the new server the Domain controller or does all that have to be done manually?
Also: should I rename the new server to the old server’s name once all is said and done?