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)

In 2004 a cus­tomer asked me to quote on set­ting up a prod­uct called Win­dows Small Busi­ness Server. I had never heard of the prod­uct but I had a good knowl­edge of Active Direc­tory and Win­dows Server 2000 so I sub­mit­ted a quote. Inves­ti­gat­ing the prod­uct while doing the quote I was intrigued by the value it pro­vided. It included Win­dows Server 2003, Exchange 2003, Share­point, Out­look 2003, and some­thing I’d never heard of called Remote Web Work­place. I’d noticed it was included with my Microsoft Action Pack sub­scrip­tion so I decided to play around with it. Long story short, I really liked it, installed it for my own use, and started sell­ing it to cus­tomers. I’m still run­ning it on the com­puter I orig­i­nally tested it on. It’s woe­fully under­pow­ered with a Pen­tium IV sin­gle core 1.6 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, a sin­gle 10/100 NIC and three IDE hard dri­ves, not exactly ideal for a server that’s a domain con­troller, file server, and Exchange server. Despite this it’s been hap­pily chug­ging away for almost seven years now. Most of my cus­tomers have moved on to SBS 2008. I have a cou­ple of cus­tomers bump­ing up against the 75 user limit in SBS. I was going to migrate them to Essen­tial Busi­ness Server 2008 as it has a 300 user limit. Microsoft very recently dis­con­tin­ued EBS so this went out the win­dow. They are going to have to migrate to Win­dows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. There’s not a lot of doc­u­men­ta­tion (if any) of this online that I can find. SBS Migra­tion who sell doc­u­men­ta­tion and sup­port pack­ages for many Win­dows and Exchange migra­tion sce­nar­ios doesn’t sup­port this yet. If you are doing any kind of Exchange or Active Direc­tory migra­tions I highly rec­om­mend SBS Migra­tion. Hope­fully they’ll sup­port this sce­nario in the future. For now I’m on my own. I’m going to migrate from SBS 2003 on my old woe­fully under­pow­ered server to Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. I will be using another under­pow­ered server I pur­chased off eBay for this. I’ve been using it as a Hyper-V test bed. I’m going to repur­pose it for my pro­duc­tion server. This is prob­a­bly a really bad idea but it’s on hand and I don’t need to lay out any cash. Like most small busi­ness own­ers cash for new equip­ment is always in short sup­ply. It’s a 1U Dell SC1435 with two Opteron 2350 2GHz Quad Core CPUs and 16GB RAM. I installed Server 2008 R2 Enter­prise edi­tion and setup the Hyper-V role. Dell 1U servers are very noisy. I moved the server out to the tool shed. I’ll be using RDP and vmcon­nect for the rest of the setup. So far I’ve installed a Win­dows 7 vm for my account­ing with Sim­ply Account­ing and a Server 2008 R2 Enter­prise vm. I’ve joined the 2008 R2 vm to the domain and pro­moted it to a Domain Con­troller. So far I haven’t run into any per­for­mance issues. I’m pretty sure I’ll run into IO issues even­tu­ally as there’s only room for two hard dri­ves in the server and I didn’t opt for the expense of SAS dri­ves. There’s only two giga­bit NICs which may also become an issue. If the drive IO becomes an issue I guess I’ll have to look at a home built SAN. That’s the beauty of vir­tu­al­iza­tion. It’s easy to change out the hard­ware as the vir­tual machines don’t inter­act directly with the hard­ware. If the lack of NICs becomes an issue I have one slot where I could install a 4 port NIC. I’m not sure where to pro­ceed next. I think the best path would be to install another 2008 R2 vm and install Exchange 2010 on it then migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2010. There’s quite a bit of doc­u­men­ta­tion on this so I should be able to mud­dle through. Once I’ve got Exchange migrated I’ll move DHCP and all the FSMO roles to the 2008 R2 DC and decom­mis­sion the old SBS 2003 server. If the per­for­mance isn’t suf­fer­ing too much I’ll prob­a­bly add another 2008 R2 vm as a file server. I’m sure there will be a lot of AD cleanup involved after­wards. SBS has a lot of pecu­liar stuff in AD to make every­thing work on one box. I don’t plan on doing all this overnight. It’ll prob­a­bly take a month or more. I’m sure there will be a few detours along the way as well as doing some work for pay­ing cus­tomers. I’ll blog about the steps I take, prob­lems I encounter, and more so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Jeff Mid­dle­ton of SBS Migra­tion con­tacted me to let me know they do sup­port this and other cus­tom migra­tion paths. Here’s what he said:

“SBSmigration.com has not yet released a stan­dard Swing It!! Kit spe­cific to this migra­tion path, but does pro­vides sup­port with many vari­a­tions of project already doc­u­mented. In this case, this project is a cus­tom project vari­a­tion of the 2003 to SBS 2008 project solu­tion. If you are inter­ested in a Swing Migra­tion path and sup­port on any project you have in mind, you should con­tact SBSmigration.com for spe­cific details.”

This is very good news. I’m still going to try this on my own as a learn­ing expe­ri­ence. I think this migra­tion sce­nario may become more com­mon now that EBS is no longer sold. If I do this for a pay­ing cus­tomer  I will def­i­nitely be using SBS Migration.

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 (Part 4)