KDB Systems

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)