Can existing install of Server 2003 be picked up and dropped onto new hardware?

Archaea

Archaea

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I am responsible to administer a windows 2003 domain server and about 5 xp computers. The server's motherboard appears to be dying - it is about 7 years old - an old pentium 4 setup. The mirrored boot drives keep unsynching, and the synching process for two 80 Gb drives takes hours and hours and the machine is unusable during the resynch. I'll need to update the hardware, but would prefer to just drop the Windows 2003 server software as is with financial databases, logme in settings, gpo settings, file shares, ad structure, and backup settings onto the new hardware without spending the time to rebuild everything. The server is light use.

I know when I've tried to drop an existing OS install onto new hardware it does not work well in XP -- it never seems to run fast regardless of driver re-installs and replacements. However with Vista and Windows 7 it works great. Has anyone tried to do this with Server 2003? I've not tried it yet, but I'm considering trying it to save hours of administration time. I'd just try one drive from the mirror first and assuming I can replace all the drivers and get it moving smoothly then I'd just mirror the other drive back into synch. In an ideal world this wouldn't happen and I'd reinstall from the ground up. But I don't want to spend the time if I don't have to. This is volunteer work and it otherwise works fine and is setup properly as it is.

Cliff Notes: From its existing p4 server, could I migrate/upgrade successfully to a newer Intel i7 or i5 chip hardware and motherboard without reinstalling the OS and still have smooth operation? What about moving to AMD's processor and hardware? (cheaper) I'd assume after 6 or 7 years there is very little shared drivers on the Intel side anyway as far as chipsets, etc. It'd probably have to be every new driver anyway!
 
You're going to end up with problems. And being that this is your only domain controller, it would make recovering difficult if anything bad happened (and it probably will). Windows 2003 and Windows XP are very similar. Becuase of this, the experiences you have for WinXP should be similar to what you see with 2003.

If you don't want to reinstall, I would just invest in a new controller card and move the RAID off the motherboard and on to a dedicated card.
 
It can be done but it also can be iffy. Best option would be to install a raid controller and move the boot drive to it. You can then move that raid controller to the new system. Really I would reinstall server 03 on new hardware and migrate the domain over or just rebuilt it. I mean with 5 computers it would as quick if not quicker to just redo everything.
 
swatbat said:
It can be done but it also can be iffy. Best option would be to install a raid controller and move the boot drive to it. You can then move that raid controller to the new system. Really I would reinstall server 03 on new hardware and migrate the domain over or just rebuilt it. I mean with 5 computers it would as quick if not quicker to just redo everything.
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I agree, I think bringing up an ADC and then migrating everything over to it then decomission/repair/replace the old one.
 
/usr/home said:
You could use Acronis' Universal restore. It works awesome.
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Another program you could use is called ShadowProtect, allows you to back up and restore images on to different hardware. Just a box to check off when you restore that indicates you are going to different hardware and it strips out everything during the restore process.
 
Forgot to add. Just go buy a cheap dell server or something without an OS on it. Yes server 03 will work with many xp drivers but issues can come up. A low end dell, hp, etc server will have support for the os and give you less issues in the long run.

Also buying something like acronis with the universal restore is an option although if the system is having issues I'd be worried about corrupted software due to them. If it is doable I'd say new software install with the new hardware. Really depends on what is running on it. If it is just running fileservices and say a quickbooks server or something reload. If it is running a business software that is going to require the vendor to move it to a new server then maybe just try the migration first.
 
We had a similar issue with this. What we ended up doing was moving from a Dell pe2800 to q custom server. What we did was add all drivers for our new system to the existing 2k3 install. The way this was possible for us was we did a mirrored array for the os with expanded raid for storage via media bay and powervault. If you can get the o/s to boot you are golden. We didn't experience any of the slow downs you mentioned. However, we imaged (ghost) the o/s to another file server and ghosted back down to the new setup. This shouldn't be that difficult and you could probably handle this in a weekend. If you were really concerned you could use a program that creates a virtual disk of your setup to run on a virtual machine (cannot remember the name, but I can check this out when I get back to the office) and push that onto your new setup or even a temp computer until you have the new setup in place. There are a few options here so don't get overwhelmed. It sounds like you are more concerned with settings being saved than anything else (A.D., etc) so you should be fine.
 
Disk2vhd

This what the program we used to create the virtual machine. It worked very well.

A few notes:

Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.

Do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
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I'm not sure if there would be a way to push this out to vbox or vmware, but I'm sure there is a converter for that out there. Hope this helps.
 
Yeh, convert the current server to a VM using VMWares converter, then you can use ESX (free) on a new decent server machine with hardware raid to run the VM
 
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