Using VMware Server to Upgrade a Domain from NT4 to 2003 or 2008

Just when you think you’ve really seen the last of NT4, a new client shows up, they have an NT4 domain, and they want to upgrade it. Crap, you think. You’ve tossed that old workstation that you knew was compatible with NT4 AND with 2003, and wouldn’t crash in the middle of the upgrade due to driver issues.

You generally don’t want to use one of the customer’s NT servers, because:

• The rollback plan is difficult and risky.
• Sometimes they only have one and that’s a big risk of losing everything during the upgrade.
• Most of the time their servers are full of software that makes them run slow and will probably cause errors during setup or not run properly afterward.

So the best thing is to provide a computer for the task, install NT4 on it as a BDC, promote it to PDC, upgrade it to W2K3, and then bring in the shiny new server they just bought as another W2K3 DC and move all of the FSMO roles over.
Maybe you still have that old SMC NIC with the 10bT RJ-45 plug and the coax BNC connector on it, if you can find it, and if it hasn’t been damaged, kicking around in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

The problem is that hardware which NT4 can detect and load drivers for natively is almost completely extinct now, and searching for NT4 drivers for stuff is time-consuming and often futile.

Leaving your loaner workstation, and maybe your 2-port KVM switch onsite during the upgrade was always kind of a bummer anyway.

Well, my friends, there is a better way. You can skip all of this hardware difficulty by using a virtual machine. You can carry a DVD around with me containing ISO images for NT4, SP6, IE6sp1, Win2003, SP2, and VMware server on it. You can load this on any XP workstation at the client site during the upgrade, or maybe their new server. You can use VMware Server to host an NT4 BDC, promote it to PDC, and then upgrade that to Windows 2003.

I had only previously done this in a lab environment – but last week, I did it for real. The customer was a 10-user geographic data mapping company in a downtown Seattle skyscraper.

There are some tricks that you have to observe to make this work. The first time I tried this, in the lab, I was able to load up NT4 just fine, but when I tried the in-place upgrade to Windows 2003, it failed. I don’t remember the exact failure mode, but it just plain didn’t work – until I used Windows 2003 RTM instead of R2. For some reason R2 had issues with the VM, or the upgrade, or something, but RTM did not. You also want to have NT4 SP6a handy, for bringing your VM (and their server if necessary) up to speed.

 Here is the winning combination - make a VM with the following specs:

• OS: Windows NT
• SCSI Controller: LSI Logic (not really important but you have to choose one, so…) 
• Hard Disk: 8gb IDE (not SCSI!)
• Memory: 512mb or more. 

1. Start the VM and immediately go into the BIOS to set the time and change the boot order to HDD, then CD.
2. Attach an NT4 Server ISO or put an NT4 CD in the drive.
3. Format 4gb of that 8gb disk, and install Windows NT as a BDC. (NT4 picks up the VMware NIC during setup, so you can obtain an IP address and join the domain as a BDC)
4. Install NT4 SP6a_128, and (optionally) IE6 SP1.
5. Attach a Windows Server 2003 RTM (not R2!) ISO or put a CD in the drive and attach it to the VM.
6. Upgrade the OS and install Active Directory.
7. Allocate the remaining 4gb of disk space to another drive letter and move the swapfile over to it to free up some disk space on C.
8. Install SP2 for Windows 2003.
9. If your new 2003 server is R2, you’ll need to update your schema at this point, just like a normal upgrade.

Now you can add your new DC to the network and move your FSMO roles around.

Will this work with Windows 2008? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet. I doubt you can do an in-place upgrade from NT4 to 2008, but you can certainly do the in-place upgrade to 2003, extend its schema all of the way to 2008 levels, and then join up your new 2008 server.

Tags: Domain Upgrade, Migration, NT4 to 2003, VMware Server