This (hopefully) short series of posts chronicles my migration of a few legacy and .NET websites to a W2K3 Server.
One of our objectives is to clean house and get rid of old dead web sites, SQL databases, and even servers. We realized we really didn't need a server just to be a SQL Server and another server just to be a SQL Server backup as we have for the last 4 years. We also realized that with our lower traffic levels, we can put SQL Server on the same W2K3 server with the web sites. I would anticipate arguments to this approach, but we are quite happy with the economies we are now seeing with a streamlined and more reasonable approach to server deployment.
It feels very good to go into the W2K3 IIS MMC and see only a few sites when before you had to scroll through them, and similarly with SQL Databases, seeing only the fewer number of active databases is good for the soul. To get an idea of volume, 4 sites and 11 databases are being migrated. Of the 4 sites, one is a legacy MSXML-based ASP ecommerce site and another (thankfully a .NET site) talks to everybody, including COM+, remote XML data, Active Directory, and Sharepoint.
Migration to a new server is always a pain, but I highly recommend it to anyone working on a sever that has been online for 3 years or more. Of course, the enthusiasm of that recommendation may lessen depending on the problems and issues I'll be blogging about in the upcoming days.