Windows Server 7 Beta Feature Focus - Migration solutions for WS08 R2

I viewed a LiveMeeting today on migrating to WS08 R2. The full transcript should be available here later:

http://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=488&DownloadID=14733

Benefits of migrating to 2008 R2:

• Clean OS installs exhibit more stability
  
  
  • Reduces risk and downtime
    
  • Performs most of migration tasks while the old server is still operational
    
  • Verifies migration and benchmark performance before switching to the new server
    
  • Rolls back to old server if migration fails
    
• Provides a transition path from
  
  
  • x86 to x64 OS (WS08R2 is x64 only)
    
  • Physical to Virtual (and vice versa)
    
  • Full server to server core (and vice versa)
    

  Windows 2008 R2 migration guides for AD/DHCP/File and more are online now here:
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd365353.aspx
  

Supported Scenarios:

General Process:

They than ran through exporting DHCP on a 2003 x64 server - the password is used to encrypt the exported data.

And then re-import on the Windows 2008 R2 server with the DHCP feature installed (but not configured)

Then, the importResult variable can be used to review/parse for any warnings or errors from the import. The example they used was the administrator and guest account not being imported because it already existed on the target machine.

They then show the DHCP and user data imported successfully.

I did ask a question if they plan to allow you to scan and export and have the import install the necessary roles and features, and they did intend the import/export to do this in a later version. Apparently they liked this question, because I won something. Yay!

Then they moved on to a file server migration. Basically similar process for file shares, export, then import, and it recreates NTFS and file shares on the target server. Very neat stuff, and nice to finally have some tools for role migrations!