GRH Consulting, LLC

So the restore took 9 hours to complete, which is down from 1.5 days when I tried to restore from a USB 2.0 external drive and 1 day over the network.  I accomplished this by added the drive to the only open SATA slot in the new dell server.  Once restored, I had to locate the driver for device PCI\VEN_1166&DEV_024A$SUBSYS_02051038&REV_00 as Acronis Called it.  Fortunately, I was able to find a Google article that pointed towards the Dell Broadcom HT1000 Chipset SATA Driver for the PowerEdge 2970 (Thank you drivershq.com).  With that installed, the server rebooted and come up like a charm.  I was required to reset the IP setting on the new NIC card so that it mirrored the old server’s settings.  With that done, I rebooted one more time, just to verify that all the services would startup correctly – which they did.

 After testing with a laptop on an isolated network segment, we determined that it was good to go.  We connected the new server to the backbone and immediately saw it start to pickup e-mail from the backup POP server that is used when our primary is down.  So far, so good.  In testing the VPN, we found that it was not pulling IPs from the DHCP server, but rather issuing 169 addresses.  This was corrected by re-running the Configure Remote Access Wizard. 

 Now all that is left is to Run through the steps in the Migrating to Windows Small Business Server 2008 from Windows Small Business Server 2003 manual (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=52B7EA63-78AF-4A96-811E-284F5C1DE13B&displaylang=en or http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92482 for the latest Docs and planning guides).  Note that prior to doing this in the actual production environment, I did perform the entire process using Hyper-V Virtual servers utilizing the above manual.