OK, first and foremost I'm not a networking/hardware specialist, so please be patient :-) Here's my current worry...
For the past four years I've been running a small network with one Windows 2003 Server (with Active Directory, DNS and DHCP services - I'm guessing this is the Primary Domain Controller...) and between three and four attached workstations (Windows XP and Windows Vista) and a couple of network printers. I guess you could call the installation basic, but it does what we want it to do - we're a small web development company so the server provides general data storage and also IIS so we can give our customers extarnal access to 'work in progress' web sites through the development. The server also runs SQL 2000 and SQL 2005.
The time has come to upgrade the physical server (it's 5 years old and realtively low spec. hardware wise) and whilst we're at it would like to update the OS to Windows Server 2008 64-bit edition - seems to make sense, but correct me if you disagree.
My initial thoughts were to build the new server, turn the old server off, attach the new server and then attach the workstations to the new server/domain. Whilst I guess this would work, I do know enough to know it's a bit messy and there's probably a better way to do it.
From searching around (particularly in this forum) I believe you can add a second server to the network, and somehow get it to mirror the services on the original server (the Primary Domain Controller), but I have only a vague idea of how to do this and the one thing I want to avoid is killing the existing functional network - we need to be able to work!
Can anyone point me in the right direction - a step by step guide would be a help as, as I say, I'm no network specialist (as you probably have gathered!).
Thanks - sorry for the tome!
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