Planning Active Directory Migration

There are two general strategies you can pursue when moving from an Active Directory Forest that has domain controllers running Windows Server 2003 to an Active Directory Forest with domain controllers running Windows Server 2012 R2.

Forest migration is easily the trickier of the two. This is because with a forest migration, you’ll need to create some or all of the objects that are present in the source forest in the destination forest. The benefit of an Active Directory migration is that you can (theoretically) get rid of much of the cruft that may have built up in your Active Directory environment over time. The drawback is that if you have active directory integrated applications, like Exchange, this process is going to be complicated.

Upgrades are far more straightforward, but you won’t be required to perform the sort of spring cleaning operation that you would with a migration, simply because you can just upgrade Active Directory without worrying whether or not all the objects that you are upgrading are still necessary. When you perform a migration, at some point you’ve got to decide whether an object should or should not be migrated, and that decision takes time.

At a high level, upgrading Active Directory from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2 is fairly straightforward:

In the next few blog posts, we’ll talk more about the complexities and challenges of migrating Active Directory from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2.