Hi, we’re looking into basically buying a 2nd hand identical server to what we already have (HP Proliant 360 G3) as a redundancy.
We’re running SBS2003 – it’s an OEM edition that came with the server.
Our reasoning for it is the server is coming up to 5 yrs old, this year we can’t afford to face any large expenditure so to have a backup machine that is identical would be beneficial – you can pick them up cheaply enough.
In theory, if our server dies – it would be a case of moving the 2 mirrored drives into the new machine and off we go.
However, I know licences are involved!
Can you tell me what would happen? Have found similar scenarios but it’s a little unclear, as this won’t be a fresh install with an old OEM code – the hard drives themselves would be swapped across.
If it gave us 30 days to activate, we could quite conceivably buy a Retail SBS2003 edition, though I’m not sure how we’d put that in if the installation is already complete.
Advice welcome!