Small Business Server 2003 R2 Standard, Migration to Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (Continued)

Having installed Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 to our source server, we will need to now rerun the SBS BPA to find any new issues that the SP introduces. You may recall there are some new features such as RSS that are enabled by the installation of this SP.

The results of the SBS BPA show the following issues:

Looks like that list is a little shorter now! So let’s address the issues in red to start with.

Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is enabled and should be disabled on Windows SBS 2003. This issue is highlighted as fixable in the BPA results using this KB article, however if you follow the link you will need to redirect to this newer KB to get the right patch.

Download and run the x86 version of the hot fix..

Again accept the license agreement and click next to start the install, it is a very small update and should apply in a matter of seconds.

This update should also resolve the ‘TCPA Enabled’ BPA critical issue, but a reboot is required prior to the changes becoming active.

To minimise our reboots let’s look at the other two critical items and see if we can apply any of the fixes.

Task offloading is enabled & TCP Chimney is enabled, are both fixed without the need to install any other patches. So let’s apply those fixes before our reboot. (Task Offload fix is documented here)

To disable TCP Chimney, open up a command prompt and type..

Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED 

Press enter, and the command simple returns ‘OK’, moving on to disabling ‘Task Offload’

You’ll want to open up the registry editor, Start > Run > regedt32

Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

On the Edit menu, click New, then DWORD Value

Name the value ‘DisableTaskOffload’

Press enter to accept the name change, then enter again to edit the value. Enter a 1 in place of the 0 (0 = disable 1 = enabled) )that is to say, 0 disables, disabletaskoffload and 1 enables, disabletaskoffload)

Click on OK to accept your changes, and then you are good to go ahead and reboot.

That takes care of the 4 critical issues highlighted by the BPA, and now we can focus on the remaining warnings shown.