Hi All,
I am currently drawing up the planning for our server upgrades. All the hardware has been taken care of and we will be moving from a Windows 2003 server environment (Mainly physical servers) to Windows 2012 Datacentre running on various vSphere hosts. I have a good idea on how to plan the upgrade and in what order but would be interested to hear what others advise and things I need to take on board.
Current Server Environment:
Site 1: 14 x Physical Servers (All Windows 2003), 2 x vSphere Hosts (8 Virtual machines all 2003)
Domain controllers (PDC, SDC), 2 x File servers, 2 x SQL Servers (Upgrading to 2012), 2 x Terminal Server, 2 x Exchange Server (Upgrading from 2003 to 2010 - Possibly hosted), 1 x Print Server and various other less critical 2003 servers.
Site 2: 4 x Physical Servers (All Windows 2003), 1 x vSphere Hosts (3 Virtual Machines all 2003)
Domain controllers (PDC, SDC), 2 x File Servers, 1 x Terminal Server, 1 x Print Server, 1 x SQL Server (Upgrading to 2012)
Both sites are connected via VPN with 200MB Link each end.
I would like some advice on where to start e.g. Promote the Domain Controllers first? Would also like more separation of services as currently the domain controller are running too many roles and features - Whats best practice. The new hardware is quite high specced so can fire up as many VMs as I want so would like to use this to my advantage and have proper separation of services.
Look forward to your advice and thank you for taking the time to read/comment!
Keg.