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With support for Windows Server 2003 now finished, migration solution provider Zinstall has unveiled some top tips for businesses.
“61 per cent of companies still run 2003 servers, which from now on are exposed to security breaches and compliance concerns,” said James Wilkins, senior server migration specialist at Zinstall.
“Why do so many businesses still postpone their migrations? The thing is, migration effort involved in the upgrade is quite substantial, and requires long hours of manual re-installations, re-configurations and recovery, IT operations which are expensive in time and in money. And if that is not a roadblock enough – business continuity interruption in manual migrations tends to be several days.”
Wilkins sat down to discuss this with Chris Lerner, Senior Support Engineer with one of New Jersey’s retail outlets. Chris has recently migrated 17 WS2003 servers in one week. The whole project was performed by a single tech (Chris himself), without allocating undue resources to the migration project. Here are his tips for the transition process:
1. Plan your migration
“Two things were most important in the planning process: understanding what we have, and planning our downtime.”
2. Try to get it done in one concentrated effort
“Using Zinstall WinServ, we have migrated to 2012 not just the 2003s, but also our 2008s – future-proofing the estate.”
3. Automate all you can
“One of our key decisions was to attempt to avoid manual migration as much as possible. We’ve decided to check if there are tools out there that can help, and have decided on WinServ, which was able to migrate server applications, settings, databases, and, of course, files.”
Read about these top migration tips in more detail on IT Channel Expert.
PCR recently interviewed Microsoft about Windows Server 2003 end of support to find out about the various migration options, business opportunities and safety and security implications. Check out the interview with Microsoft’s hybrid cloud business lead Patrik Bihammar below:
