SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 2)
Preparing a server for Exchange 2010
The Server 2008 R2 domain controller has been running for a couple of days. Active Directory replication is working. DNS is installed and working. As a test I went into several mmc consoles on the SBS 2003 server and made some changes to Active Directory. The changes replicated to the 2008 R2 DC. I did the same thing on the 2008 R2 DC. I made some changes in DNS on both servers as well. All was good. As a bonus I found some orphans in both AD and DNS from when I was testing IPv6. I took this as an opportunity to clean up AD and DNS. I don’t know if any of these orphan entries would have hindered the Exchange migration but it’s always best to have AD as clean as possible in any case. Now that AD was ready it’s time to bring up a Server 2008 R2 virtual machine to run Exchange 2010 on. The latest white paper for 2008 R2 Hyper-V claims there is very little difference in performance between dynamic and static virtual disks with Hyper-V 2008 R2 so I decided to test this and installed Server 2008 R2 Enterprise into a virtual machine with 2 virtual CPUs, 4.5GB RAM, and a 127GB dynamic virtual IDE disk. The RAM may be a little light. The minimum for Exchange 2010 is 4GB. I made it 4.5 to be a little above. If that causes performance problems it’s easy to change later. The same applies to the number of CPUs. If the dynamic disk is a problem I can move the Exchange database to a different disk. I’ll probably end up doing that anyway as it’s not the best practice to locate the Exchange database, logs, etc. on the same drive as the OS. I installed Server 2008 R2 in the virtual machine then downloaded and installed all the Windows updates. Microsoft has some great tools to help with installing Exchange 2010. The first place I visited was the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. This is a great tool that will walk you through many different Exchange deployment scenarios. I picked Upgrade from Exchange 2003, answered a few questions on the next screen, and got a step by step checklist of what needed to be done. It’s a great tool. One of the first steps is to make sure you have all the requirements in place to Install Exchange 2010. Another great tool is the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer. You need to download and install this tool. I installed it on the server I’m going to be running Exchange 2010 on. When you run it you have to specify a domain controller. I tried it with both domain controllers and got the same results. Different results here would be a sign that something was drastically wrong with AD. The report said I had to change the existing Exchange 2003 server to Native Mode and make a couple of registry changes on the server that was running Exchange. I did this, re-ran the scan, and was left with one warning. The warning was that during the Exchange 2010 installation the schema will be updated such that I would no longer be able to install an Exchange 2007 server in the domain. If I want the ability to do this I’d have to install an Exchange 2007 server before installing an Exchange 2010 server. That would be a lot of extra work. This made me pause. I’m not planning on installing any Exchange 2007 servers once the migration is complete. If something goes wrong however I had it in the back of my head that I could always just migrate from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 which includes Exchange 2007. If the schema change when installing 2010 precludes this I’ll have to re-think my upgrade path. I planned to halt the migration here for now anyway. Before I restart I’ll have to do some investigating of this issue. I can obviously restore my SBS 2003 server to the state before the schema is changed but if the migration takes a long time this would mess up the restore process. I’d have to restore the SBS 2003 server then restore the latest Exchange 2003 database. It’s not really that big of a deal but as I was going to pause here anyway I’ll spend some time thinking about this. Watch for the third instalment of this series once I ponder for a while.
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 1)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 2)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 3)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part4)