IcemanND Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 Short background: Company has hired me as a contractor to get their systems set up. They already have and have been running on a SBS 2003 server for the last few years. They recently, before hiring me, bought a second with the hope of setting it up in some form or redundancy.I've found that SBS2003 does not support clustering, I can apparently setup the new server as a backup domain controller, but that still leaves the Exchange server and file server, DNS etc. I'd rather not do backup and restores from one to the other, it would be much nicer to have one mirrored to the other but I'm not finding a solution in that manner.Any suggestions out there? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 You could consider using some sort of VM underneath the SBS 2003 server, but that platform was designed specifically not to work with any sort of techniques for failover or recovery (other than making backups), because that functionality requires 2003 Ent or higher.I think VMWare offers VM redundancy/clustering in their ESX product, but it doesn't support atomic writes to the virtual disk (so it's not 100% HA/failover), and it requires a SAN.Honestly, it'd be cheaper to migrate to non-SBS servers at that point anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IcemanND Posted February 9, 2009 Author Share Posted February 9, 2009 Thanks for the info. I was afraid that this was going to be the answer. Now the fun part breaking the news to the customer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 (edited) Well, short of being an a**, telling them that they should have checked the licensing before thinking this was feasible would've saved them some heartache. Even if you can do it, it's against the EULA:Q. Can I separate the components of SBS 2003 R2; for example, install Exchange or SQL Server on another server?A. You may not separate the software for use on more than one operating system environment under a single license. This applies even if the operating system environments are on the same physical hardware system, such as by using virtualization technology.You could add additional 2003 servers to be DCs if you want, - but the FSMO roles are stuck on the SBS server (and you can't add a second SBS server, you could only add a Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter server). And, of course, you can't add another Exchange, SQL, ISA, Sharepoint, etc server into the environment without removing the SBS server from the domain. There does appear to be a gray area where you could buy an additional Exchange server, SQL server, etc and buy the full license for those and not be under the SBS splitting the single license that comes with SBS, but at that point you don't really need SBS anymore, so... Edited February 9, 2009 by cluberti Checked the licensing site to make sure this is correct - it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tech Posted April 5, 2009 Share Posted April 5, 2009 If the hardware is the same, you could use Acronis to take images on the live server and then image the spare server, once you have this done you could swap the server into the live enviroment and see how the clients respond. this is a good bit of software ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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