You have to run the schema upgrade, but nothing says that you ever have to bump the domain functional level or the forest functional level.
I've done this for a number of customers, with no ill effect. I'd recommend you roll out 2008 or 2008 R2. It'll save you work in the future. From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:00 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Adding 2008 DC's... We have an environment with five 2003 Server DC's. I need to roll out two new DC's and would like to make them 2008 Server. Do you guys consider this a major or minor infrastructure change? I'm on the fence - existing DC's are untouched save for running ADPREP on the schema master, otherwise the existing DC's are untouched. Lots of new features though and to me just as importantly 2008 will be supported for years to come. My fellow SE's are telling me to just roll out 2003 and call it good, but to me it seems silly since our DC's typically hang around a long time (6+ years currently), and in 5 years security patches go away for 2003 (extended support ends 7/2015, and mainstream support ends 7/2010). Comments? David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
