Microsoft stopped selling Windows NT Server completely in June 2003.
Since January 2003 they've been phasing out support for it - click here to see their latest schedule for this.

Option 1

You do all the purchasing - we perform the upgrade

Purchase all the software and licences

Agree with us a specification for the upgraded network

Arrange and pay for the installation of any Internet connections and other external services

Carry out the upgrade

Provide email and telephone support plus re-visit your site, if necessary,  to sort out any problems related to the upgrade for 30 days following the upgrade

Provide help with administration and other difficulties you might have as you get used to the new system for 30 days following the upgrade

(What happens after 30 days?)

Be on standby to come back on Monday morning in case of any problems.

Option 2

We purchase everything on your behalf & perform the upgrade

Approve our costings for the upgrade

Send out purchase orders we've prepared in your name or enter your credit card details when required

Pay for the installation of any Internet connections and other external services

Research the best deal with suppliers and produce a detailed costing

Prepare the purchase orders, check the equipment when it arrives and deal with any returns

Arrange for the installation of any Internet connections and other external services

Perform the upgrade

Provide email and telephone support plus re-visit your site, if necessary,  to sort out any problems related to the upgrade for 30 days following the upgrade

Provide help with administration and other difficulties you might have as you get used to the new system for 30 days following the upgrade

(What happens after 30 days?)

Send out purchase orders 1 week later.

Allow at least 2 weeks for the equipment to arrive.

Another visit to inspect the equipment.

Perform the upgrade over the next convenient Saturday & Sunday.

Be on site on Monday morning in case of any problems.

Ongoing network administration and general network support require regular ongoing payments. If your company is large enough these payments will probably be the wages of fulltime IT staff or you may be lucky enough to have a staff member with good networking and PC skills who, along with doing their normal job, manages the day-to-day running of your network so that you only need to hire outside expert help occasionally. Without sufficient in-house skills or the justification for IT staff, monthly payments for a support contract with an outside company may be the insurance you need.

This is what Rhebus Networks can offer in the way of post-installation support:-

My Business is heavily dependent on a program we had specially written for us and which will only run on Window NT4. We're stuck right?

If you do decide to upgrade a 2-year-old server I strongly recommend that, to boost the server's reliability, you also:-

3 years of AD design experience has led to some some solid Best Practice design rules.

These include IPSEC encryption, Public Key Infrastructure, Hard Disk Quotas, Driver Signing and Group Policies.

In practice an upgrade is often used as an opportunity to remove inconveniences with the old system - such as reorganising file-shares - and so you're likely to have to visit each workstation as part of the upgrade.

When all your PCs have been upgraded to Windows 2000 or XP Pro, support for "legacy clients" can be turned off which will then improve the security and efficiency of the network.

It's better to upgrade the servers to Windows 2000 before upgrading the workstations.

Windows 2000
Server Type

Maximum
Number of CPUs

Maximum Amount of
RAM in Gigabytes

Extra Features

Clustering Service - 2 Nodes

Clustering Service - 4 Nodes

Process Control Tool

Winsock Direct

Microsoft occasionally have promotional deals on Advanced Server making it only slightly more expensive than the Standard version (instead of being double the price) which may appeal to some companies with an eye towards expansion.

Microsoft doesn't sell Datacentre Server directly to end users. Instead you have to buy it from authorised resellers as part of a hardware and support package. The price of a server with Windows 2000 Datacentre installed on it starts around £30,000 and goes rapidly upwards.

Microsoft Backoffice Small Business Server was launched in 1997 and is a bundle of several Microsoft server products.

The word Backoffice was dropped from the name in the 2000 version and the product was renamed Small Business Server 2000 (SBS 2000). The package includes a slightly crippled version of Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server, SQL 2000 Server and Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server.

Microsoft has attempted to hide the complexity of the various servers in SBS 2000 by developing a unified, wizard-driven installation and setup procedure as well as a simplified administration interface to encourage small businesses to install the product themselves without the need to enlist expert help. This has only been partially successful and there are still plenty of ways to get into trouble.

If your company uses 3 out of the 4 servers in SBS 2000 then, for 50% more than the cost of Windows 2000 server alone, it represents great value.

SBS Gotchas

SQL Server is a heavy-duty database which may be over-the-top for companies with under 50 users (remember, someone's got to design and maintain the database).

Exchange is overkill for most small companies. There are cheaper alternative mailserver programs that are easier to maintain and offer more features than Exchange.

Here are 3 that we like:-

To sum up our recommendations about Small Business Server 2000

If your company is at a single location, is never going to need more than 50 CALs and is happy to have a single server run it's entire network then SBS 2003 then:-

If you're considering SBS 2000 for you network remember that SBS2003 was released on 8th October 2003 - see how it compares here.

More bad news is that your Windows NT Client Access Licences (CALs) - the licence each workstation on your network needs to access NT servers - don't count for accessing Windows 2000 servers. As an indication of the cost of an upgrade, the current price for Windows 2000 Server with 25 CALs is £1239 + VAT.

A Windows 2000 server hands out your precious CALs as freely as those people in the High Street hand out advertising leaflets so remember to allow for all dial-in and VPN clients when calculating your CAL requirement.

Do Windows 2000 CALs count for accessing a Windows Server 2003 server? I'm afraid not.

Enough of this bad news! Tell me something I want to hear

This Technical Information page elsewhere on this site has a point-by-point listing of the advantages of Windows Server 2003 over Windows Server 2000.

Short answer: 2000 is still the safest bet but with each passing month the argument for 2003 gets stronger.

For information and pricing on upgrading/installing Windows Server 2003 click here.

Are you sure that your business-critical program won't run on 2000 or are you trusting someone else's word? It's worth testing it for yourself - you might be surprised.

I'd consider Connectix or VMWare a stopgap solution to your problem.

A program that will only run on Windows NT suggests to me that it was written using poor, short-sighted or amateurish programming techniques.

Let me guess at your situation:-

You'll need to extricate yourself from this mess sooner or later.

Here's how:-

You'll also need to have a data conversion utility written to bring your old data into the format required by the new program.

Agree on marketing rights to the program: you might just end up with something you can sell to other companies in your business sector.

Option 1:

Check the server meets the recommended minimum hardware specification - borrow some hardware if necessary: 133MHz CPU, 256Mbytes RAM, 2Gbytes Hard Disk space.

Disconnect all other computers at the network hub/switch.

Perform the upgrade to 2000 and install the DNS service. Don't worry about hardware driver problems as long as the video card can run in VGA mode and the network card is operational.

Give the new Windows 2000 server an appropriate IP address and netbios name then connect it to the network switch. Join the new server to the domain and run DCPROMO to make it a Domain Controller. Seize all the Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) roles from the old server.

Copy across all data from the old server duplicating file shares and NTFS permissions.

Copy across all other setting such as DHCP and WINS.

Run DCPROMO on the old server to demote it from being a Domain Controller and remove Active Directory. Disconnect the old server at the hub/switch, change the new server's IP address and netbios name to that of the old server.

Reconnect all the workstations to the network.

Keep the old server running in isolation until you're sure that you've transferred all settings and data.

If you want to use the old server on the network you'll have to reinstall NT4 and make make it either a member server or BDC.

Option 2:

You'll have to create users to match those from the NT domain and copy group membership and NTFS security permissions.

95/98/ME workstations should work as normal if the new server has the old server's netbios name but NT/2000/XP/2003 workstations and servers will need to join the new domain.

The trickiest problem will be to restore the profiles of the NT/2000/XP workstation users and this means visiting each machine to do the following:-

Before the Domain Upgrade

After The Domain Upgrade

Delete any email stores or personal documents from the Default User profile.

If there are more than one user of the workstation log on under each account and recover any email stores or personal documents and settings from their old profile which will now be marked as "unknown". Finally delete all the "unknown" profiles.

Option 3:

You can use another server, temporarily, to upgrade the NT domain to 2000 before handing over control to your new server. You'll need NT and 2000 drivers for the essential hardware components of the temporary server.

lubricate the existing fans. Add some more fans.

Instead of spending money beefing up a single server it may be more cost effective to buy 2 simpler servers. That way you get dual everything. The ideal situation would be that, under normal circumstances, both of these servers share the workload of running the network. Then, when either one fails, the remaining server takes over the running of the network, by itself, without the users noticing and then when the failed server is repaired the 2 work in partnership again - all of this without any human intervention. Given the right circumstances and careful design this is close to achievable with the standard version of Windows 2000. In almost any network a second server gives enough redundancy to make it worthwhile.

Consider what services your network provides and what would happen if you got into work one morning to find your one main server had failed overnight. Would your business stop as your workforce couldn't use email, access information, process orders etc or would that second server have saved the day, be running most things as normal and, after a few nudges, start providing the few functions it had missed?

Instead of a huge panic you could get the failed server repaired at your convenience.

With our upgrade options the cost of having a second server adds approximately 80% to the cost of a single server.

If there are any loose ends or items that, for whatever reason, we've been unable to complete you can list them on the Sign-Off document. We'll then countersign to indicate that we agree that these are still our responsibility to complete. Such items would hopefully be trivial matters such as sending you the completed network diagram. If, however, there was something more serious that needed time to resolve, was beyond our control or had only a small impact on your network's functionality we could indicate on the Sign-Off document that we agreed for you to withhold part of our fee until the matter is resolved. Perhaps BT hadn't installed your ADSL circuit on time so you couldn't test Internet connectivity.

(This is required to upgrade the current domain. It's possible to start afresh with a new Active Directory Forest but this way causes the least disruption to NT/2000/XP workstations. More details here.)

Copy the Windows 2000 installation files (everything in the i386 directory) to the C: drive - c:\software\i386

Copy the latest service pack to c:\software\sp4.

Extract the service pack files (w2ksp4_en.exe -x) and apply them to the original installation files (c:\software\sp4\i386\UPDATE\UPDATE.EXE /s:c:\software).

Download the latest Windows 2000 drivers for the video card, network card, motherboard, ADSL modem and any SCSI/RAID controller.

Install DNS, create an Active Directory Integrated forward lookup zone and chose a name for the zone.

The name you choose doesn't have to be "Internet-legal" - maybe companyname.corp (The .local top level domain has been reserved for this purpose.) Create a matching reverse lookup zone. Don't create a root zone. Configure DNS forwarders - they  usually forward to the DNS servers of your ISP. Deselect "Round Robin".

Make a NTFS primary partition using the remainder of the drive capacity as the D drive.

(If you previously failed to make a 5gb C drive, use PowerQuest Partition Magic 8 (www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/) or BootItNG (www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html) to expand the 2gb partition to at least 4gb and use the remaining disk space for the D drive primary partition.)

Unless you know otherwise you've probably got the workstation version of PartitionMagic and/or DriveImage. This will refuse to work with servers unless you attach the server drive as a secondary drive in another computer running a workstation version of Windows.

Alternatively consider if you want to install Microsoft System Update Services (SUS). If so set it to synchronise with Microsoft's Windows Update site. Set the Domain Controller to be a client of SUS with permission to automatically install approved patches but to require an administrator's permission to reboot.

Setup IIS5 as your Intranet server, construct a simple Home Page and make a DNS A record for it such as win.companyname.corp

To avoid visiting workstation PCs, take the NT Server offline and set the new server to take over its Netbios name and IP address.

Use PowerQuest Drive Image 2002 (www.powerquest.com/driveimage/),  Norton Ghost (www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/) or BootItNG (www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html) to make a disk image of the C drive for disaster recovery.

When you no longer require any Windows NT Backup Domain Controllers change the domain from mixed-mode to native mode. (Active Directory Domains and Trusts - Select Domain Name - Properties - Change Mode) This step cannot be reversed.