Further to my previous post “Slamming down the Virtualisation Gauntlet” our virtualisation plan to reduce the number of servers from 10 to 4 is still underway though it’s a slow process - better safe than sorry is the mantra I’m employing here.

I am happy to report I have successfully decomissioned the first of the old machines completely. This machine used to be, wait for it: Active Directory Master, DNS, DHCP, WINS, Exchange Server 2000, Mail Archive, Email2SMS Gateway and one time file server.

A number of odd systems were still insisting that this machine was DNS master even though it hasn’t been so for some time and fortunately migrating the Mail Archive was a lot easier than I was expecting so nice work GFI.

Migrating Exchange was always going to be tricky but upon reflection I have to say it wasn’t the nightmare process I was expecting. There were one or two obstacles to overcome but following the clear instructions from Microsoft the process went relatively smoothly.

The Microsoft document is on the Technet site entitled:

How to Remove the Last Legacy Exchange Server from an Organization

Previous Posts on Virtualisation

Virtualising the Print Server

Slamming down the Virtualisation Gauntlet

Virtually Serving SQL Server

Virtual Server 2005 Cannot move snapshot image