We recently decided to decommission one of our datacentres, as the hardware there was getting old and the service we were getting wasn’t that spectacular. Most of the machines there were fairly old, too, so it gave us a good excuse to rebuild our aging AD servers as 2012R2, for example.

The only newish gear in that datacentre is our internal Lync 2013 pool, which was built just after Lync 2013 was released. As a result, the machines are running Windows 2012, and there are only two Frontend servers – we built it with the old recommended layout and never quite got around to building a third frontend (ever seen a builder’s house?).

Instead of migrating, I figured it would be a good opportunity to rebuild the servers on 2012R2 in the new datacentre.

In this series, I’ll document the steps I take to add the new pool, migrate the users, redirect the external services and decommission the old pool. Hopefully it’ll all go smoothly, but we’ll see.