Transitioning Exchange 2003 to 2010

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I used to love Hyper-V until today. *cries*

 

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When migrating the mailboxes to the new server, it sounds like it was creating a hundred gigs worth of transaction logs (I guess you didn't enable circular logging or took backups in between mailbox moves), which sounds like one reason why 250GB wasn't enough due to the OS, apps and swapfile taking up considerable space as well... (in addition to the new Database you were filling up).

Hope the restore goes well. Did you check your disks for any errors? I've only had a Hyper-V merge throw an error once which resulted in loss of data (external USB disk, it was bumped during a merge process on one of my lab tests) but I was able to recover from this...

 

Mate before performing any migration/installation the number one rule which you did is get a decent backup.

One thing I would say is I would recommend not installing any AV on the Exchange 2010 box until you have all mailboxes migrated and you are happy it is running.

I have lashed Exchange 2010 in my home environment, one server running as CAS and Hub Transport with the other as Mailbox.

I'm not sure what certificate you had in Exchange 2003, if it's a normal single SSL, I would recommend ditching it and getting either a SAN or wilcard certificate.

With 2010 perform the certificate request in Exchange 2010 itself rather than in IIS, go to CAS Server > Server Configuration > New Exchange Certificate which has a wizard. Once you import it just assign the Services to the server.

This way you avoid any autodiscover issues.

Good luck with the restore and migration mate!

 

Damn straight. Even though I have been working on and off trying to recover the VM most of the day, I don't mind as it's in the comfort of my own home.

Some quite bizzare and unexpected behaviour from Hyper-V though. I wanted to expand the VHD file and I knew in order to do this I would have to get rid of the snaphot tree, merge the various avhd's then expand it at that point. As soon as the VM shut down, one of the main avhd files (the largest one) spontaneously deleted itself. Unfortunately I didn't realise which one, so it's taken quite a while just to esablish what went missing. I found out and have now copied over a backup of the missing avhd file and the merge that should have started 6 hours ago, has now started.

I hope it works ok when it's finished, but that's yet to be seen. If it doesn't it's time to switch to a different plan, but that will set us back quite a few hours and will mean re-moving the majority of the mailboxes again. At which point, I'll hand over to Ken's uber exchange skillz.

The lesson I have learned today though is to do a full backup before trying merge snapshots. I suspect the problem could be related to the lack of space when Hyper-V tried to start the merge.

 

To be honest we do have a decent backup solution in place, and so far it's been worth it's weight in gold. I just should have been extra paranoid before trying to increase the storage size this morning.

 

It's not such a big issue if you follow guidelines on AV exclusions, at least I have not had big issues but YES, AV running in the background during massive transactions can be an issue: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332342.aspx

Yes, the Microsoft recommendation is to use SANs. And powershell can be used to do all the cert work using commands such as:

Code:

$data = New-ExchangeCertificate -GenerateRequest -SubjectName "c=com, o=company, cn=webmail.company.com" -DomainName company.com
–IncludeAutoDiscover:$true –IncludeServerFQDN:$true –IncludeServerNetBIOSName:$true –PrivateKeyExportable:$true

Set-Content -path C:\CertRequest.txt –Value:$data

Import-ExchangeCertificate -FileData ([Byte[]]$(Get-Content -Path C:\certnew.cer -Encoding byte -ReadCount 0))

Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint 5113ae0233a72fccb75b1d0198628675333d010e -Services IIS

Gets it all done in a few copy pasted lines ;)

Are you using local disks or SAN storage? Probably the latter. But yes, space issues are an important factor in ensuring virtualization software from Microsoft works correctly (due to the fact that you can have dynamically expanding disks).

 

Microsoft strongly recommends against disabling IPv6 on their latest OS and supported applications.

All apps these days are coded and tested ONLY on machines with IPv6 enabled. Microsoft cannot guarantee that the application functions as expected with IPv6 disabled. Any support issues you raise with PSS will, if they find out, ask you to reenable IPv6 to keep Exchange 2010 at the level it was designed to function.

Also, some of Exchange 2010 features will cease to function if IPv6 is disabled, even if you don't use it on your network (i.e. no IPv6 support on your switches, routers, etc).

I would try to find an alternative to disabling IPv6 to fix any issues you experience with OWA. From my experience, disabling IPv6 has NEVER been the solution proposed to our customers in order to fix an issue.

 

Have to agree with Shinihami, disabling IPv6 normally causes a whole host of other issues e.g. DNS problems.

I would recommend enabling it mate.

For the OWA can you go into IIS 7 and then browse to the Outlook websites manually, try them all and see if you can browse to any off them. If you cannot I would recommend reset all the virtual directories and trying again mate.

Link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff629372.aspx

 

It's a product group recommendation, I just follow their recommendations

Strange issue regarding your public folders... Just out of curiosity, do you have any plans to migrate "away" from them? Say, to Sharepoint? Some rumors say 2010 is the last Exchange version to support PF's (they did say this about Exchange 2007 as well tho').