In November, I attended a Microsoft session where I was given the impression that you could simply upgrade your SBS 2008 box to SBS 2011 by simply clicking an upgrade button using the SBS 2011 CD. Wrong! The only way to upgrade from any SBS to 2011 is a migration install. Luckily for me, I had already virtualized the SBS 2008 server using VMWare VSphere so I didn’t need to get another computer box to perform the migration.

The premigration check told me that Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 needed to be installed (this takes about 2 hours). You would hope that the pre migration check would catch issues that would cause problems, but the checker missed that a very important service that was not running properly (NTFRS, it seems when you migrate SBS 2008 into a VMWare environment, NTFRS needs a little TLC).  As a result, the first migration did not succeed.

You will need to create an answer file for the new server to go into migration mode. Make sure you get the day / time settings correct as this can really bugger up the new server if done wrong. After a few hours setup will complete and you should hopefully get a message the migration was successful. If not, examine the setup logs to see why and START OVER :(

Once you have SBS 2011 running, you should start the migration wizard. I found the instructions were sparse, sometimes pointing to web documents relating to SBS 2003 instead of 2008. Moving of the Exchange mailboxes needs to be initiated from the Exchange Management Console in SBS 2011, not on the 2008 box; you will get bizarre error messages if you try to move the mailboxes the other way. You can accept 25 corrupted emails per mailbox without an error that aborts the process. Also note that you need to upgrade your mail enabled distribution lists, otherwise the mail will be delivered to oblivion. Triple check that all your mailboxes have been moved over before decommissioning the old server

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