Our team is migrating around 2x SBS 2003 servers as week right now over to SBS 2011 Standard. We’ve gotten pretty darned good at it but every now and then something stops you dead in your tracks. Today one of the guys was onsite doing part of the preflight check on a migration. As part of that we need to revert the server from a 2 NIC configuration with ISA as the firewall to a single NIC configuration. He did this and rebooted the server as planned. However after the reboot we found that there were issues. Users could not do DNS, they could not get an IP via DHCP or anything like that at all. After scratching our heads for a bit we finally remembered something we long forgot now… the Scalable Network Pack that Microsoft deployed as part of Windows Server 2003 SP2 was the problem. It’s been at least 5 years since I’ve seen an issue caused by this and for some reason the patch that Microsoft released to disable these features on SBS was not applied to this server. The patch I’m talking about is this one http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496. After we applied this and rebooted – everything was fine.
I’ve got to say though… it’s been a while since I’ve seen this issue. You can bet that a check for this patch is now part of our server build/migration documentation for sure!
Did you also forget SBS is a dead product?? Why migrate to a product you know is gone especially for customers who already keep their technology way too long as it is? You seem to driving SBS down a one way street… The client being tight isn’t a justification this time surely. Can you buy Software Assurance or similar anymore? This would seem to just differ a full price for big boys infrastructure by I guess a decade.
David, for our clients, right now, SBS 2011 Standard is the right product for them. It gives them 5 more years of cost effective infrastructure and gets the most out of their $$ for now. Within the next 5 years, then we get to see what else comes up and how to handle that.