So here is my plan in slightly more detail.
I have an SBS2003 with Kerio Connect 7 on it serving approximately 30 clients, all of which are running Windows XP except a couple of Vista and Win 7 machines. All users have roaming profiles.
The box running all this is old and slow and is being replaced. My plan is to replace it with a shiny new Mac Pro.
Migrating email is simple, I will host a Mac version of Kerio and simply migrate the existing data, no issues there. I will then convert the SBS install into a VM which will run in either VMWare Fusion 3.1 or the latest Parallels.
It seems to me I have the option of actually hosting the roaming profiles on the Mac server (Mac Pro will be running Lion Server), or I could simply make the VM bigger and keep the profiles hosted on its virtual internal drive. Currently SBS is installed on a partition of the internal hardware RAID (only 120GB total including all profiles and shared data).
Obviously if I could, I’d ditch Windows altogether but I understand I cannot run Lion Server as PDC for Windows 7 clients and since all new client boxes will be Win 7 clients, this is not an option.
The main purpose virtualising the SBS is so I can take regular snapshots in case of a massive crash. The last time it failed catastrophically it took 3 days to rebuild. Using a VM and a good backup system means it will take only minutes. I’m thinking it would be nice to host the profiles on natively on the Lion Server and simply use Time Machine to backup them up regularly. Does anyone see any major stumbling blocks with this part or indeed with the whole idea?
I’m thinking the VM and its backup snapshots as well as the shared data and profiles will probably be stored on a mirrored (software) RAID using a pair of big SATA drives with maybe one more in slot 4 as a TM backup.
Any and all opinions and advice is welcome.
Thanks in advance.
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