Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 Essentials

Question

My wife's office has a single 9 year old server 2008 R2 installation. It has all the roles as it is the only server in the office. We are buying a new server to upgrade the old hardware. Because the office is so small, I'm ordering Server 2019 essentials. The 2008 is full blown and was over built when the integrator sold it to us.

The current server is of course the PDC and has all the functions, but that's it. It is there for authentication, file and print services. They've moved their application to a hosted provider in the cloud. There is no IIS server, SQL, applications or anything running. It's really there just to authenticate logins.

I've found several articles about migrating but none are quite like I have. They all seem to have multiple servers, etc. This is a one box to one box scenario and I haven't done a migration like this in years. I just want to be able to build the new hardware up and have it take over all the functionality of the current server while maintaining the domain name, then shut down the current server and send it to recycling.

Any guidance to this process would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello @Sonny Gutierrez ,

Thank you so much for posting here.

Based on my understanding, we are planning to migrate the server 2008 R2 to server 2019 essentials. The server 2008 R2 currently is PDC. To migrate AD from windows server 2008 R2 to windows server 2019, we could follow the below steps:

1, Check DC health by running Dcdiag /v and check AD replication by running repadmin/showrepl and repadmin /replsum if there are more than 2 domain controllers before joining the new DC.
2, If we get no error message after running the commands, we could go next.
3, The minimum requirement to add a Windows Server 2019 Domain Controller is a Windows Server 2008 functional level. The domain also has to use DFS-R as the engine to replicate SYSVOL. So before we add 2019 DC to the existing domain, we need to ensure the functional level is at least Windows Server 2008, and the SYSVOL folder replication type is DFSR.
4, Then we check whether the preferred DNS server of this 2019 server is correct.
5, Join the new server 2019 to existing domain.
6, Add DNS role and ADDS role and promote the new server as Domain Controller.
7, Repeat step1 to check AD environment health.
8, Transfer FSMO roles to the new DC if needed.
9, Demote the old DC if needed.
10, Raise domain /forest functional level based on our requirement and environment.

For any question, please feel free to contact us.

Best regards,
Hannah Xiong