We are currently running WSS 3.0 with a SQL 2000 backend.  The servers are getting old and we are planning to upgrade to a newer version of WSS probably next spring.  Based on what we have now, can someone give me some advice on which version we might want to upgrade to and why?  We are not interested in running the latest and greatest.  We just want to go with a version that is solid and works well.  I assume that we may need to upgrade our SQL server as well but am not sure.  Please give any details regarding that as well.  thank you

You will need to upgrade your servers no matter which version you go to.  Since you are on WSS 3.0 I assume you want to stay on the free version.  If so I would recommend you take a look at SharePoint Foundation 2013.  I know you say you don't need the latest and the greatest, but 2013 is the current version and will last you longer before you will have difficulty finding support and need to upgrade again.  having said that it would be a little easier to upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010 since you can do that directly from WSS 3.0.  Depending on your patch levels you may still need to do some patching on your WSS environment before you can upgrade.

Thanks for the reply.  It sounds like being able to upgrade directly from WSS 3.0 to 2010 will be the best way for us.  What about our SQL server?  Will we have to upgrade to something newer like SQL 2008?  Do you have links to some good articles about upgrading from WSS 3.0 to 2010?  We may run this(sharepoint server) on a virtualized (hyper-v) environment.  Any gotchas on that?

thanks for your help.

Hi Poly Admin,

There are articles about how to upgrade from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010. Before you do an upgrade, make sure you have WSS3.0 SP2 installed. Then, you can follow the official documents below to do your upgrade:
Upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303309(v=office.14).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff959273(v=ws.10).aspx

Thanks,

Qiao

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YOu would need to upgrade to a minimum of SQL 2005 (that's the minimum requirement for SharePoint 2010).  I would recommend upgrading all the way to SQL 2008 r2 if you are going to upgrade SQL.

No real gotchas running on Virtual vs. Physical.  Just make sure it has enough resources (CPU, Disk, Memory).

http://sharepoint2010blog.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-upgrade-to-sharepoint-2010-using.html