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I am currently running Windows Server 2003 Standard on a Dell PowerEdge T710 Server and things have been running pretty smoothly. I'm sure someone has discussed this at some point in the past but I am curious to know if there are any compelling reasons to upgrade to a new version of Windows Server ... and how much pain am I likely to endure to make that type of transition?

There's a number of reasons. Server 2003 extended support ends 7/14/2015 which means by that time, there will be few people who will be familiar with it and continue to support it. Most stopped after 2010. There's a good chance if something went wrong, you would have a very difficult time trying to replace it.

Another good one is the mainstream use of 64 Bit Operating Systems for Servers. RAM limits are much higher than the 4GB limit of Server 2003 32 Bit. Lots of new features as well. Newer server versions play better with the new desktop OS's. E.g. Windows 7 plays well with Server 2008R2 and XP plays well with Server 2003. XP is also going out of extended support in less than 2 years.

The main reason for me would the chance of a hardware failure. Hard drives follow a bathtub curve. Meaning hard drive failure increases significantly after 5 years. All components generally start to wear down after that amount of time.



If you enjoy what you have now, you can always virtualize the existing instance and move it to new hardware.

Hi Sandeep,

Re: the above curve.

Is this "evidence based?"

Intuitively, this seems accurate, but is there data to support it? For example, do we know when the "Wear out failures" curve starts to increase? 4 years? 6 years? 5.0125 years?

Inquiring minds want to know!!!!!

Gene

Some data from Google implies a relatively steady failure rate, rather than the "bathtub" curve.

It makes sense. My experience matches this trend. Also, there were a couple studies:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681-2.html



The highest average operating time in this sample of 4000 drives was 5 years. Then again these are consumer/desktop drives not enterprise/commercial drives.

Another good study by google here with 100K drives: http://static.googleusercontent.com...ogle.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

The causes of failure are debated, but there nonetheless appears to be an increasing trend as time goes on.

When talking about MTTF, there are many variables. Just about every article about it is based on scientific research. They just bend it their way.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/making-sense-of-mean-time-to-failure-mttf/310

Ron, it depends. It can be painless or relatively painful. Trying to change your SBS from 2003 to 2008 in a weekend can be a daunting task.

Many IT Pros recommend using Swing Migrantion a technique invented by Jeff Middleton. You do have to have an extra computer/server in order to make the change.

Swing Migration allows you to upgrade your OS offline while continuing to use your production server. You get 90 days of email support. You can swing the new OS back to the original server, but it works best if you have a new server, which in your case would not make sense.

This may sound like a stupid question, but for what are you using your server?
Simply as the Active Directory, it can run fine with 4 G of memory. You could replace hard drives to eliminate the issues about failure.
The big reason it would need more memory would be serving as the Amazing Charts file server and concomitant SQL server. What about moving these to another computer with gobs of memory and hard drive space.
Sure, Server 2003 is long in the tooth. It's doing what it needs to do. The key is to keep it from failing at the low level tasks and move the memory intensive tasks to another platform.

If performance is acceptable at this time, the key issue is going to be hard drive failure (or power supply, other internal part which are replaceable without damaging data) which would have the potential of loosing data. If you replace the drives (or convert it into a virtual machine on another machine) data loss is lessened and now your worry is performance loss.

16 G of memory on any kind of quad core is inexpensive and would probably give you more than enough to deal with SQL and AC. Even if you dedicated 4 G to a VM version of the 2003 server, you would probably have adequate memory and much better than what you have now.

The question was "compelling reason."

A) If it ain't fixed... But some preventive maintenance might not be a bad idea. You will probably gain some speed, but it might cost a bit.

B) Going with an new server isn't a bad idea. This one has been tanking along apparently quite well for quite a while. By the same token starting fresh would reset the clock to 12:00. The essential versions are not all that expensive but would still be more than what you have above.

C) It would appear you can take your time and decide what your best options would be. The real question is how much faster AC would be with more memory and probably faster system.

I know the Dell T-710 is no spring chicken but it does have 8 cores, is it really that dated? Actually server 2008 was out when I bought the server but the IT that set the server up said that it was too new and that I should stick with the tried and true Server 2003. I use the Active Directory primarily for user access control and the server is also the centralized data depository for commonly used forms and the storage depot for all the old medical record that are scanned from multiple workstations to the same folder location on the server. It is also the usergate proxy and firewall for user internet access. I suspect this is the way that most of you are using a centralized server. For sure, there are many server features that are under utilized as I spend too dang much time practicing medicine to explore them. Imagine that! If I were to upgrade to a more modern server, what might that be? What is the best current, stable operating system that you might suggest to replace Server 2003? How much are we taking about? I'm curious about the swing migration that Bert mentioned. Is this an online service? How expensive it that? Does any one have personal experience with it? Bert did you use this make an OS or server tranisition?

SBS 2011 Essentials is $400 and 25 CALs are included. Then you would need someone to install it or you could follow my video tutorials which were specifically for setting up AC and SBS 2011 Essentials.

Depending on the number of users, it may just be easier to start fresh.

What is the difference between essentials and the standard version? Is there a way to upgrade without any significant downtime?

Essentials has easy to use wizards and a 25 User Limit. Has the same core as Server 2008R2 so any additional roles you want to add you can.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you do not need a lot of processor power to run Active Directory, run the firewall and serve as a document server. From that standpoint, no upgrade would really be needed.

What you could do is to virtualize the current server and put it on another system that would be 64 bit and give a more memory to run AC and SQL server while still running Server 2003 to get the Services currently running. This Virtualization could be run on Windows 8 with hypervisor or even Windows 7 with a third party virtualization software.

Another option would be to set up another box with Win 7/8 and 8-16 G of memory to run AC/SQL and leave Server 2003 alone to do it's thing.

Your server hardware is capable of handling much more than what it is doing. Your primary limitation is RAM and is because of Server 2003's 32 bit status. Other than memory, there is no good reason to move to another system.

SBS 2011 Essentials is much easier to manage, would go backups easier than your current system and could be clean start to begin again. 2012 Essentials has just been released and is not the same product, it is closer to what was SBS regular minus exchange and sharepoint. Not sure about price but I think they are about the same. 2012 may work with Windows 8 better but has JUST been released. Both are still based on System 2008R2 core as Sandeep pointed out above.

If it ain't broke... More memory may speed things up, but probably more in relation to AC. Do you have a gigabit network. That would probably make a bigger difference than messing with the server.

Given that most of us are still using the flagship Dell server, PowerEdge 2900, how is the T-710 old?