Good Migrations: How To Move To Windows Server 2008

Installation
Microsoft has changed the installation procedure for Server 2003. Windows services are now kept on a hidden partition. Unlike with Server 2008 and previous server operating systems, not all services are installed at once—with the administrator left to disable the services that aren't required. It's just the opposite: No services are installed by default; the administrator is then left to enable each service, one at a time, as needed.

That's good, in that installations can be done in a fraction of the time it took to install previous operating systems. But it also means that administrators will need to more closely manage each server's services after installation. Mazzanti told CRNtech that it made his migration much easier to write PowerShell scripts for a number of different functions required for server deployment and then were able to re-use them—so that re-inventing the wheel for each server function wasn't necessitated.

Hyper-V
If Server 2008 was a Broadway production, Hyper-V would get the biggest dressing room. It's the star of the show, even though it won't officially launch until later this year.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't factor into migration planning and actual migration, since the beta is available now and, as mentioned earlier, testing has shown it to be somewhat stable. Using Hyper-V along with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, subsequent migrations (or consolidations or disaster recovery deployments or new test beds) can be performed using Hyper-V itself. To do this, Microsoft has created a "quick migration" capability—allowing an administrator to create a server with client services in a virtual machine on a physical host, and then move that server to another physical host by re-writing the memory. In that case, the migration could be done in seconds—or the time it takes to write memory to disk.

In this case, once the migration from Server 2003 or earlier environments is done to Server 2008, the next generation of server migrations should be a snap.

As long as everyone reads the manual.