Microsoft ISA Server Editions

The first way we’ll talk about involves the in-place upgrade from 2000 to 2004.

As stated before, an upgrade involves simply installing ISA Server 2004 on the server already running ISA 2000. This simply upgrades the installation from 2000 to 2004 and migrates some, but not all, of the configuration settings. The settings that are not migrated are: bandwidth rules (since there are no longer supported in ISA 2004), permission settings, and logging configuration. Permissions and logging settings will have to be configured separately after the upgrade. Also, some settings are modified when you do an in-place upgrade. For instance, IP packet filters, protocol rules, and site and content rules are replaced by access rules or system policy rules.

When a migration is performed from an ISA server 2000 infrastructure, settings are merely copied from the ISA 2000 machine and imported to a new server that is had ISA 2004 installed on it. On the ISA 2004 installation compact disc there is an ISA Server Migration Wizard that is run on the ISA 2000 machine. The wizard will export the settings from an ISA 2000 machine to an XML file. This XML file is then transferred to the ISA 2004 machine, and the settings are imported. When this configuration migration is completed, the 2000 configuration settings are imported with the same restraints as in-place upgrade.

The third of method of upgrading from 2000 to 2004 involves upgrading an ISA server 2000 that is running the Routing and Remote Access Service providing VPN access. There are some restrictions on configuration migration in this scenario, and we’ll cover them when we talk about VPNs in a later article.

Well, that’s it for this installment. In our next article in this series, we’ll cover the important aspects of planning an ISA infrastructure and the various deployment scenarios you can use.