Final session of the day was on "Upgrading to Exchange 2007". Sadly, it was primarily about upgrading FROM Exchange 2003, but it did raise a couple of significant tid bits worth knowing.
Firstly, Exchange 2007 apparently doesn't have any mail routing configuration - it uses the Active Directory Sites and Servers configuration to determine which site is which, and follows the same replication topology that AD uses. This means that we'll need to consider this when designing the AD structure, and also lock down the topology against changes. If we went down the Exchange path, routing and replication changes would need stricter change controls involving both teams.
Secondly, Exchange cluster/failover changes require having the same operating system on both halves of the cluster. And, in-place upgrades of the OS are NOT supported for Exchange 2007 servers. In practical terms, this would mean that a ceentralised Exchange cluster built on Windows 2003 servers would have a lot of challenges when the time came to upgrade to OS to Server 2008. We'd basically need to build a new cluster, set up connectors and migrate the mailboxes individually. The user mailbox would be unavailable during the move.
So, to defer the pain, it would be easiest to deploy onto Windows 2008 servers, so we'd want a WST supported 2008 build first.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Almost like Microsoft are trying to drive adoption of more Microsoft technology. Whatever next?
Post a Comment