This section was created to research and accomplish a server upgrade for Friendship Pasadena Church’s QuickBooks server. As of Nov 2023, Friendship Pasadena was on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition but we needed to complete this upgrade with Microsoft’s announcement to end its support on Jan 9, 2024.
Options we evaluated:
- In-place upgrade
- We decided that this requires purchasing of a new license for ISO, even after deciding that we can use the Standard edition (not Datacenter edition) for $1069
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/pricing
- Essentials at $501 - uses single CPUs so this option will not work with AWS
- Friendship Pasadena church will be on t3.large and amazon does not specify which server version we are running.
- Conclusion: the best approach is to spin up a new AWS instance and migrate the data from
- Set up new AWS server and migrate
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y0f4sZ_Rw6oMKWHKho_Y1L02uGrnO1ZUIBfpn4lUitE/edit?usp=sharing
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Spin up a new AWS server
Steps to set up a new AWS server
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Create a customer user profile - i.g., friendship
- Grant Administrator status
- Allocate the following group policies
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In the Run command, enter gpedit.msc
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Options for Migrating data
- Option 1) OneDrive Sync
- Install the OneDrive desktop client
- Important: For the next steps, make sure that you are logged into the user profile that the client will be logging onto (NOT admin profile)
- Connect the desktop client to the cloud OneDrive account and specify which folders to be synced from the cloud
- Open the client and select the settings icon (gear/clog icon)
- Click on Choose folders and make sure that the checkbox for the folders that you want to be synced are selected
- Option 2) AWS Data Sync
- Note: AWS Data Sync was NOT necessary for Friendship Pasadena, as the QB files are all synced in OneDrive
Steps for AWS Data Sync
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Install QuickBooks (after migrating data from the old server to the new)
- Open QB by selecting the existing QB files
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Install MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint