Transitioning Exchange 2003 to 2010

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Well following from this post almost a year ago, our hand has been forced and we've started the transition to Exchange 2010.

Luckily SP 1 for Exchange 2010 is out, so that has resolved a few issues that we were investigating last year. During the install, it kept on failing on the installation of the Mailbox Server role. This was down to Exchange 2010's special mailbox - the discovery mailbox. We had to delete/remove the mailbox, I was already wondering how to recreate it, however after successfully installing the mailbox role and all updates, it seems that it was recreated for me anyway.

We were planning on running Exchange 2003 and 2010 side by side, but found out that while users on both version of Exchange could send/received external e-mails, users on Exchange 2003 would not receive e-mails from users on Exchange 2010. Tracked that down to a corrupted routing connector, the 2010->2003 (the 2003->2010 one worked fine). Was going to investigate it further to see how to either repair or recreate it, then decided it wasn't worth my time - to spend time fixing something that would let me run both systems side by side just for a few days. So decided to just transfer all the mailboxes across.

So currently out of just over 1700 mailboxes, a fifth have been transfered so far (with 1 fail) and it's been going for about 6 hours now. After the transfer of the mailboxes, then I have to transfer the publish folders and sort of the iPhone not syncing before I finish it off. The users that it's failed on will be transfered manually at a later date.

Looks like another weekend at work

Will post updates later...

-ken

 

Lucky you, wish I could do more project work (especially larger scale ones), but we all have our roles to play...

Tried it, got some useful info from it - got some not so useful info from it.

As for our new Exchange 2010 server, I've currently merged the CAS, mailbox and hub transport into one. Once all the mailboxes & public folders have been transfered, then I'll create a separate CAS server to replace the "front-end" server. And once all the work has been done to replace the Exchange 2003 servers "like for like", I'll start looking into UM.

Cool, do you just specialise in Exchange or do you do other areas as well?

-Ken

 

A couple of links that have helped me, hope that they'll be of use to you:

Exchange 2010 Deployment Assistant
Install Exchange 2010 in an Existing Exchange 2003 Organization
Rapid transition guide from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010
Upgrade Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

Other resources that I either had on hand or used:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant (imo, it ain't pocket size)
Microsoft 70-662: Exchange Server 2010, Configuring MCTS

There's a few more, but it's on my work machine.

-Ken

 

Cool, you're a better man than me then when it comes to Exchange.

No worries

Thought that book looked familiar, forgot all about it. Used it for the first time around.

And it does

Thanks guys, will let you know how I get on (so far 6 failed mailbox moves due to maximum number of corrupted items, even though I specificed -1 - to ignore errors...)

-Ken

 

I've got this coming up fairly soon. Interesting that you thought is wasn't worth running the 2 side by side, or the time to solve the problem. I'm probably not going to have that luxury.

Are you virtualising your exchange boxes or are the physical, because we are going to be virtualising ours.

Hope it goes OK and I'll watch this with interest.

 

The thing is that I had already looked into this for half a day and came up with no solid answers on how to fix it. I knew what the issue was, but trying to find a fix for it was practically near impossible (for me anyway)... Fixes tried included things like removing the smart relay host, recreating the 2010-2003 connectors, etc...

All the mailboxes would have been transfered over by now, if I start with the plan of decomissioning 2003 straight away rather than running both side by side. If I had a larger userbase/more complex Exchange set-up/implementation, then spending the time to resolve this issue would have been more benefical to me (eg the time to research and implement a fix would have outweighted the time to finish the project in order to reduce the overall downtime).

Beside added to all of the above, the reason why our hand was forced to do the transition now was due to failures and errors on our Exchange 2003 servers due to multiple power cuts a couple of weeks ago.

The one that I'm working on now (CAS, Mailbox and Hub) is virtual - currently has 4 processors/cores allocated to it and 12GB of ram. The next one will only have the CAS role on it and will be virtual. The last one, if we decide to go down that route once we're happy with the setup, will have the UM role on it - however that one will be a physical server. But this would be another project...

-ken

 

On my to do list is to upgrade the DC's to 2008 R2 both physical and virtual. Got some high end HP boxes that I am going to put Xenserver 5.6 on with Enterprise licenses and then the web servers, file stores and exchange will sit on these. They'll be in HA mode as well so if there are any problems then they can move to another box.

Still in the planning stage at the moment then it will be test test test

 

I was migrating 1700 mailboxes, but we only have about 1350 users. As for adding more resource to it, we'll be able to do that once we decommision the 2003 server as that is virtual as well.

Anyway, problems...

No, not with the Exchange server itself - but something that affects the Exchange server. Our current Exchange 2003 server uses a total of 100GB (this includes Windows as well as the Exchange mailboxes. Due to lack of space I allocated 250GB to the new Exchange 2010 server, mistake number 1... 3/4 of the way migrating, it has used up all the space.

OK, this is easily sorted, add another vhd to the Exchange 2010 server and then transfer the mailbox store or just expand the size of the vhd file. So to prepare for this we created another pool of storage and decide to merge all the snap shots, mistake number 2. There was an issue with one of the files, so in Hyper-V when we set the task to delete all snap shots and merge - it deleted all the snap shots and didn't merge... Now we're left with a missing Exchange 2010 server with 3/4 mailboxes missing.

So currently we are running a file recovery utility to try to retrieve the missing files and at the same time we are restoring the Exchange 2003 server and the Exchange 2010 server from the backup taken last night at 18.00hrs.

There's nothing like a(nother) real world test of our DR plans

-Ken