Windows 2003 back up server

[imported_Gelfling]

Any advice would be welcomed. I currently am overseeing a network in my medical office. I do about 95% of the IT support on my own. I am mostly home taught and can put out most fires as they arise. We recently purchased an Electron Medical Record. At present, we are using an old server as our authentication server (the one that everyone uses to login to the system). I noted while some IT guys were here, that the server is likely about 4-5 old. The server was built and maintained by our old IT support comany, and they were just plain aweful. Anyway, I have some concerns that if the old sever goes down, our whole system goes down since no one will be able to log in. The IT mentioned that we could get a new server and using the software in 2003, basically build a new server with new hardware, and then trasnfer over all the info form the old to the new. We could even run them both and have one acting as a backup. Anyone able to point me in the right direction with reguard to this? Where can I read up further on how to implement this?

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Gelfling
Any advice would be welcomed. I currently am overseeing a network in my medical office. I do about 95% of the IT support on my own. I am mostly home taught and can put out most fires as they arise. We recently purchased an Electron Medical Record. At present, we are using an old server as our authentication server (the one that everyone uses to login to the system). I noted while some IT guys were here, that the server is likely about 4-5 old. The server was built and maintained by our old IT support comany, and they were just plain aweful. Anyway, I have some concerns that if the old sever goes down, our whole system goes down since no one will be able to log in. The IT mentioned that we could get a new server and using the software in 2003, basically build a new server with new hardware, and then trasnfer over all the info form the old to the new. We could even run them both and have one acting as a backup. Anyone able to point me in the right direction with reguard to this? Where can I read up further on how to implement this?

You might need to be more specific in your request. You might need to contact the company that supports the EMR software. 2003 and AD can do mountains of things, and most vendors design for it now, but your EMR software vendor can give you full details.

Basically, creating a 2003 server isn't hard at all. Getting AD right for your entire enterprise, though, can be tough. Which are you trying to do, exactly?

I'd suggest VMWare and using P2V software to virtualize the physical machine, and that way you have *no* dependencies - if the hardware in the new machine dies, just move the VMWare disk images to another PC, and kick off VMWare again.

 

[imported_Gelfling]

Thanks dclive. You essentially gave me the info I needed. The ERM is on 2 servers, each with multiple layers of redundency. Its only the authentification server, which I think of as a login portal, which is old and housed on a 3rd server. I need to back up that 3rd server only, and it has no special software on it other than 2003.