I’m in the process of upgrading all of our Servers to 2008 and one of the servers that I’ve had to migrate recently is our DHCP Server.
In doing research before I moved DHCP i came across an article or a post stating that backing up a server 2003 DHCP server and then restoring it on a 2008 DHCP will appear to work, but will eventually give you problems and\or corrupt.
Not wanting to have to recreate all of our scopes and any reservations that we had set, i did find a way to move the data using the netsh command that doesn’t appear to suffer from the same problems as a backup\restore does. (I don’t know why, just that my research showed this was the only method to migrate data between the two without risking problems down the road)
On the Source 2003 DHCP Server, open a command prompt and enter the following commands:
netsh dhcp server export <Filename.dat> <ScopeAddress>
This will create a file named FileName.dat in whatever directory you are in when you type the nets command. I named my files the same as the ScopeAddress so as to avoid confusion.
Next you need to get that file onto the 2008 DHCP Server. You will also need to launch the command prompt as administrator. The easiest way I’ve found to do that is to find command prompt in the start menu (either the recently used programs or under all programs-&amp;gt;accessories and right click and choose run as Administrator.
Now enter the following after you have changed to the directory containing the .dat file you exported previously (NOTE: since the command prompt is running as Administrator, i found that you do not have access to your network shares anymore, copy the .dat file somewhere local on the server):
netsh dhcp server import <filename.dat>
you should receive a message that the import was successful.
Refresh your DHCP console on the server 2008 and verify that the scope was created along with all options as well as any existing DHCP Leases.
Now you will need to deactivate the old scope on the 2003 DHCP Server and reconfigure any routers with the new IP Helper-Address so that DHCP requests are sent to the correct DHCP Server.
