SBS 2003 to Exchange 2007 migration
One of our clients currently runs an SBS 2003 system on some hardware that has hard its fair share of trouble (one week of downtime earlier this year, and two days of downtime in August), resulting in a decision from management to move the e-mails to a new box, and rebuild the SBS into a vanilla Win2K3 Server system.
For the new Exchange box, we ended up with a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with two RAID 1 arrays, dual quad-core, 4GB RAM, etc. It arrived about a week earlier than scheduled, and so far has been a breeze to work with.
Installation into our rack was a little troublesome due to the inability of the server rails to extend the 2-3mm extra we needed. We have a 1000mm deep rack from Cheval with the front posts moved back 70mm, and the rear posts as shipped from factory. The Dell rails were slightly too short to fit perfectly, however an adequate fit was achieved by some extra turns of the screwdriver.
It’s been about a week since the server was installed, however only just yesterday Exchange 07 was installed on the box. Installation was without trouble, and much more informative than the Exchange 2003 installation. My previous experience with Exchange 2007 is restricted to labs and virtual machine’s, so this is the first planned-for-production server that we’ll have implemented.
As of the date of this post, Symantec’s Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange does not support Exchange 2007 on a Windows 2008 x64 Service Pack 1 system. After installing SMSMSE and finding that it had DESTROYED the Exchange installation (Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Toplogy Service would not start, subsequently none of the other Exchange services would either), we had no option but to format the box and start again.
I am very impressed with the ease of use of the Exchange Management Console. It seems to make more sense to me than the Exchange 03 management tools, but as some of the major items have been re-worded, it can be a little overwhelming when you’re under the pump to put it into production.
Mailbox migration was very easy, albeit slow because of the faulty SBS2003 box hanging every few minutes (4 hours to migate a 4GB mailbox??), however once done there was very little we had to do in the way of getting clients connected up. Infact, Outlook 2007 took care of this process entirely but prompted us with SSL certificate warnings.
The SSL warnings were easily fixed - Microsoft KB940726 fixed the warning when opening Outlook, and although we had it about 85% correct, we finished off with a quick review of Sembee’s article titled Exchange 2007 Single Name SSL Certificate, and the remaining glitches were corrected.
We’ve been in production for just under two weeks, and the only issue reported was a SSL cert warning from one of the staff’s home computer - saying that “The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.” A root certificate update on the system should remedy the warning - this has been advised but the outcome is yet unknown.
The previous SBS2003 box was cleaned up a few days later and a vanilla Windows Server 2003 was installed. So far the system is running as expected - fast and trouble free. It now has the O/S on a RAID 1+hotspare.