notes on SBS 2008 upgrade

I did my first SBS 2008 upgrade from SBS 2003 this week - and it was surprisingly easy - though time consuming. Here are my thoughts on it:

• the Microsoft SBS 2008 migration demo is generally excellent and following it is a MUST. It is here
• After you create the answer file and stick it on a flash drive, you can start the installation using regular non-migration means (in my case, I used the Dell OpenManage CD to start the SBS 2008 installation). There's no real indication that you're doing a migration until you're quite a bit into the process. It doesn't really prompt you for a migration, it just starts doing it when it sees the answer file part of the way into the process
  
• After it detected the answer file and began doing the install, it said "this process may take 30 minutes or more" - it took 2.5 hours. Of note the machine I was installing on was a Dell PowerEdge T310 with 12 GB of RAM, a Xeon X3450 processor at 2.66 Ghz, and 7200 RPM drives
• the mailbox migration took 11.5 hours - going from a 3 Ghz Xeon something with 3 GB of RAM, and 7200 RPM drives to the aforementioned PowerEdge T310. Amazingly, it was only 44 mailboxes and 18 GB of data. I saw a reference to someone else who migrated 57 mailboxes with 50 GB of data in 3 hours 20 minutes.

There are some other parts to it - like the potential necessity of having to change your SSL certificate (the default is remote.domain.com). You are also required to use a certain set of IP addresses - either 10.X.Y.Z or 192.168.Y.Z or 172.X.Y.Z.

Overall, things went great. I'll post more notes when I do my next migration.