Don't panic as Server 2003 rushes towards end of life It is time to upgrade. In about a month Server 2003 will receive its farewell set of patches and reach the end of its officially supported life. You have been putting off the upgrades. I have been putting off the upgrades. With the weekends left to do this quickly evaporating, what's the checklist? Making a single checklist …
...because the likelihood of being able to successfully upgrade from 2003 SBS to anything else is so close to zero as to be a mere rounding error in infinity.
Luckily I no longer have any involvement in any of the train wrecks that still use 2003 SBS. Don't get me wrong, it was a fantastic value product and while it had some quite lunatic restrictions was still rather well featured. As long as you don't want to upgrade it. Ever.
Long story short: it was intentional. DFSR was increased in the number of files it can read/write simultaneously, and more besides.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2013/07/31/dfs-replication-in-windows-server-2012-r2-revenge-of-the-sync.aspx <-- Server 2012 R2
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/11/12/dfs-replication-improvements-in-windows-server-2012.aspx <-- Server 2012
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/01/19/dfs-replication-what-s-new-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx <-- 2008 R2
Each iteration becomes progressively more powerful. It also becomes more and more impossible to replicate the same files on the same (or even 4x better!) hardware, and run other workloads besides.
The new DFSR is far more capable and efficient regarding replicating flies. It just does NOT play nice with its neighbors. In fact, in many situations, even after turning everything down in the registry I haven't been able to get it to play nice. 10M files seems to about do for it. At 50M files it gives me nothing but grief.
The thing is, although all of our important stuff was migrated some time ago, I'm really really going to miss Server 2003 R2, it was just so rock solid (for a Windows product).
We've got 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 running in various places, and not one of them is as reliable as 2003 R2 was. They all have their own idiosyncrasies which seem to translate into unexplained crashes or downtime.
Zentyal?
I gave it a go the other day, joined it to a test server 2012 domain (at 2008 level) and took a step back slightly confused that it worked so well (as a backup domain controller in that case).
Not tried PDC but my guess is probably quite well.
For some people who have a small 2003 domain they want to keep running but not with the attack area of MS server it is quite interesting*
* until the legal guys shut it down for just working, without fancy licenses I guess.
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