Migrating in Windows Computer Servers

When you are working with computer servers, one thing that you will likely want to give careful attention is the Active Directory Service. This is especially the case if you are moving, say from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008. Even you are working on a small local area network or managing a few sites, Active Directory Sites And Services is a tool that will help you to primarily interface in order to manage catalog servers, configure and create IP subnets, site links and perform inter-site replication. For example, some site tasks might include creating, deleting and renaming sites. To go a little deeper, you can also delegate site control to another system, create a subnet for the site or connect to a domain controller. However, in most cases, the common tasks that you will perform is creating group policy objects at the site level, cache universal group memberships and enable or disable global catalog servers.

What happens though when you want to migrate from, say Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2008? This will usually involve or require a 2-step strategy. First, all the DHCP settings from your old system will need to be exported and imported into the new Windows Server 2008 system. This will require about 20 minutes to undertake assuming that the Windows Server 2008 is already installed and configured ahead of time. Do not be alarmed. The migrating process is fairly simple. First disable the old DHCP service under the DHCP settings and then navigate to the registry to copy the settings. Type Regedit.exe under “Run” to open up your registry. Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DhcpServer\Configuration key. Save the key to a network drive appropriately, such as “config.key”. You are not done yet. Computer servers also have a DHCP folder that can be located by typing “%systemroot%\system32\Dhcp”. Copy the contents of this folder into the same network drive that you saved the configuration key. Now we are ready to move to our new server that will be running Windows Server 2008.

In our new server, you will need to first stop the DHCP service if it is already running by using the command “net stop dhcpserver”. Next, double-click on the registry file that we exported earlier and verify when asked to do so. Now navigate to the folder we just imported and copy all the contents to the same folder in our new system. Now start your DHCP server again. Computer servers are easy to configure if you know exactly what to look.