license downgrade from SBS 2010 to 2008

[Conrad]

Hi Guys,

 

Not sure if this is the correct place for this, but has done a license downgrade from SBS 2010 to SBS 2008?

 

I ask as after much googling and banging my head off my monitor the most I can find is you can, but you / OEM

has to provide the product key and M$ has not procedure for providing keys.

 

Any help greatly appreciated!!

 

Conrad

[m25man]

There is no transition pack available for SBS 2008 or 2011 this was an option in 2003 but it was dropped.

There are no other options.

 

Interestingly until you run the second part of the SBS setup it is just a standard server however the product ID and the media make it what it is as there is no way back from that.

[Conrad]

Cheers m25man

[SYNACK]

SBS is a nightmare if you go off script, you can usually do stuff manually but it leads to horror movies later. Your options are usually limited to spinning up a real server install and the enterprise versions temporarily to do any translation then tacking them back into a fresh SBS install later. Take it from someone who spent 19h in a row doing a migration overnight. Hell has a lot to learn from the SBS team.

[Conrad]

As me other thread, I'm gonna go plain 2008 R2 on this box now as trying to downgrade or get SBS to do what I want just ain't gonna happen.

[m25man]

It all depends on what you feel you need to salvage from the old domain.

 

if you really need to keep your old domain SID (this can save you having to create new accounts and join machines back to the domain etc) SBS will let you join another server as a second DC and you can just dump the mailboxes into pst files.

 

So, export the mailboxes - uninstall Exchange and the SBS components, join the second DC transfer the FSM roles, demote the SBS DC or forcibly remove it using NTDSUtil.

Its a lot of work but it really depends on how many users you have to deal with.

 

Less than 10 users and the PST dump and manually drop each machine out to a workgroup and back into a fresh domain is probably quicker.

More than 10 and a full SBS swing method which will maintain the SID consistency could help the transition.

 

Whilst the "SBS Swing" methods that are well documented on the web are not meant for your intended goal the methods as described will help you if followed carefully and can save a considerable amount of time.