Upgrading W2K forest to W2K3 - Any advice? (longish)
From: Trust No OneŽ (dana.scully_at_usa.net)
Date: 05/10/04
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Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 19:30:44 +0100
Hi Folks,
The time is almost nigh when I need to consider upgrading my company's AD
forest to Windows 2003 AD. We have been performing a parallel migration from
our NT4 domains over the past year and the migration is almost complete.
Our W2K AD forest is a branch office based design ( 2 Data Centre hubs) with
an empty root domain and 3 child domains. Our DNS is UNIX based. All AD
domains are Native Mode.
One of the child domains will be reasonably large (around 25000 user
accounts at completion of migration) and locations within this domain have
quite decent circuits to the corporate Data Centre. One of the remaining
child domains is special in that it contains the largest amount of remote
locations (around 120) and low speed circuits to the Data Centre ranging
from 32K(mostly) to a maximum of 256K. The remaining child domain has the
smallest number of accounts (around 3000) with reasonable links (on average
64K) to a secondary Data Centre.
Anyway about 5 months ago when the migration had not yet reached frenzied
state we successfully introduced the Windows 2003 schema extensions as
detailed in KB 325379. The AD forest can now (in theory) accept Windows 2003
DCs, and all newly staged W2K DCs inherit the required schema updates.
So far so good :)
As far as actually upgrading the domain controllers to W2K3, the child
domain with the 120 remote sites (most with low speed circuits) will clearly
prove a headache as most of these locations will require a site visit.
I'm toying with initially upgrading only the domain controllers in the root
domain, and the two child domains with decent circuits. This will give us
some time to work out the logistics of upgrading the DCs in the "problem"
child domain :)
Is this strategy of a partial upgrade workable? Will I experience any
problems with having a single child domain hosted on W2K DCs while the other
domains in the forest are hosted on W2K3 DCs? I would envision that we would
be running in this "hybrid" configuration for at least 4 months.
Most of all will there be any problems in running both W2K and W2K3 versions
of the KCC in the same forest? This is particularly important as we have the
replication topology highly customized to match our network topology.
I'm currently working through the W2K3 Branch Office Deployment guide and a
lot of the features of Windows 2003 AD are simply mouth watering.
Unfortunately our migration started at a time when it made sense to go with
W2K AD rather than wait for Windows 2003.
Any advice/tips would be appreciated, particularly as regards pitfalls for
the unwary. Is there any further recommended reading to complement the
Branch Office Deployment Guide?
Best Wishes,
-- Peter <X-Files Fan & AD enthusiast> Please Note: Emailed replies cc'd / bcc'd , containing HTML or attachments auto-binned as spam
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