Exchange 2003 to 2010

BoomAM

BoomAM

BoomAM

Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2003
Posts
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Location
Atlanta, USA
Hi everyone,
Bit of a strange situation to describe, but bare with me:
We're gonna be migrating to 2010 from 2003 soon, and the method that I'd like to do it is a little on the odd side... rather than do it all in one go, as i neither have the time nor the resources to do it, what I'd like to do is keep our 2003 installation running until I've configured all of 2010 how I need it, then just spend a weekend transferring the mailboxes over and moving the ISA rules to point at 2010 rather than 2003, effectively allowing me to them remove 2003 and have 2010 take over where it left off.

Now, all the articles I've found are for co-existence with the load being shared between the two installs and whatnot.
Does anyone know of any guides or info about that details to some extent the method I'd like to use?

Thanks in advance all. :)
 
There's a good little handbook by Jaap Wesselius "Exchange 2010 - A Practical Approach" which takes you through installing an Exchange 2010 server into a 2003 domain and all that needs to go along with it. Also has information on moving from 2007 to 2010.

There are quite a number of new features and changes you may not be aware of that require planning for.
 
Your approach wont be a problem at all.

The RGCs will behave themselves and you wont end up with any sort of disaster if you follow the basic guides.

Make sure you understand how the deployment will affect your clients when you have moved the mailboxes over, particularly if you use older versions of Outlook or have people out in the field using mobile devices. Exchange 2010 behaves differently to 2007 and 2003 in some ways etc.

Effectively if you had the "normal" steps of co-existence, all you are doing is having a gap between the last step of installing/setting up EX2010 and migrating the mailboxes :)
 
DRZ said:
Your approach wont be a problem at all.

The RGCs will behave themselves and you wont end up with any sort of disaster if you follow the basic guides.

Make sure you understand how the deployment will affect your clients when you have moved the mailboxes over, particularly if you use older versions of Outlook or have people out in the field using mobile devices. Exchange 2010 behaves differently to 2007 and 2003 in some ways etc.

Effectively if you had the "normal" steps of co-existence, all you are doing is having a gap between the last step of installing/setting up EX2010 and migrating the mailboxes :)
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Ah, so the step for linking the two together for routing wont actually be an issue until the mailboxes are on the new server? At which point it becomes moot?
 
We've just recently done a full 2003 to 2010 migration with 3500 mailboxes in total. The problem when you start migrating, especially if you have older clients like 2003 and people with Smartphone is that they dont support auto-discover, so the users/devices wont know they've moved over, and will still be trying to get to your 2003 environment.

What you can do with 2010 for migrations, is just point EVERYONE to your 2010 CAS(s) and have the CAS automatically re-direct them to the 2003 environment if they still havent migrated over yet, if you're doing a staged upgrade like we did. We did about 300 mailboxes per day

All it involves is adding a seperate DNS record and ermmm, god mind had gone blank, will update this tmrw when I get in work and find it lol, it was fairly simple

Just remember to get your client's Outlook upgraded to at least 2007 in order to take full effect of 2010's features such as Archiving etc
 
Terrier_Jimlad said:
We've just recently done a full 2003 to 2010 migration with 3500 mailboxes in total. The problem when you start migrating, especially if you have older clients like 2003 and people with Smartphone is that they dont support auto-discover, so the users/devices wont know they've moved over, and will still be trying to get to your 2003 environment.
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Luckily all our clients are Outlook 2007 or 2010.

What you can do with 2010 for migrations, is just point EVERYONE to your 2010 CAS(s) and have the CAS automatically re-direct them to the 2003 environment if they still havent migrated over yet, if you're doing a staged upgrade like we did. We did about 300 mailboxes per day
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So what i'd do is install the Exch2010 CAS role, have OWA/internal autodiscover/external autodiscover point at that, then that will seperate the traffic between the existing 2003 server and the new 2010 mailbox server?
Then its just a case, i assume, for me to setup the hub transport, point the mail flow rules in ISA at that, at which point all the mail will flow through 2010 servers to the 2010 mailboxes once ive migrated?

All it involves is adding a seperate DNS record and ermmm, god mind had gone blank, will update this tmrw when I get in work and find it lol, it was fairly simple
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I know in 2007 all i needed was a autodiscover alias that pointed at the CAS for the clients to pickup the settings....is that what your on about?
 
You dont need autodiscover for the outlook client to know that its mailbox has moved. Basically you have outlook 2003, exchange 2003 + 2007/2010, move the mailbox, they open outlook once its moved, it picks it up from the new server.

One thing to watch out for is if email on the 2003 server is set to send out via a smarthost emails may hit the 2003 box and instead of routing to the 2007/2010 box if there mailbox is there it will try and send via the smart host.

One thing to watch out for is exchange 2010 and outlook 2003, outlook needs the security settings tweaking to work.
 
mrfil13 said:
You dont need autodiscover for the outlook client to know that its mailbox has moved. Basically you have outlook 2003, exchange 2003 + 2007/2010, move the mailbox, they open outlook once its moved, it picks it up from the new server.

One thing to watch out for is if email on the 2003 server is set to send out via a smarthost emails may hit the 2003 box and instead of routing to the 2007/2010 box if there mailbox is there it will try and send via the smart host.

One thing to watch out for is exchange 2010 and outlook 2003, outlook needs the security settings tweaking to work.
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If the existing autodiscover is pointed at 2003 though...surely it'd need changing to point at the 2010 CAS server?
Im hoping its as simple as MS says, install the CAS, point client traffic at that, everything keeps working, then its just a case of installing the hub transport, then the mailbox. And hopefully everything keeps running right on through up until someones mailbox gets migrated over to the 2010 mailbox server.
 
BoomAM said:
If the existing autodiscover is pointed at 2003 though...surely it'd need changing to point at the 2010 CAS server?
Im hoping its as simple as MS says, install the CAS, point client traffic at that, everything keeps working, then its just a case of installing the hub transport, then the mailbox. And hopefully everything keeps running right on through up until someones mailbox gets migrated over to the 2010 mailbox server.
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It really is that simple, especially as you aren't using Outlook 2003.

You *might* have some trouble with any activesync devices, I had one or two strange issues but bar those it was plain sailing :)
 
DRZ said:
It really is that simple, especially as you aren't using Outlook 2003.

You *might* have some trouble with any activesync devices, I had one or two strange issues but bar those it was plain sailing :)
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I'll hold you to that ;-)

Hoping its easy, had enough of things going wrong with one of the DCs going dead today. :(
 
BoomAM said:
If the existing autodiscover is pointed at 2003 though...surely it'd need changing to point at the 2010 CAS server?
Im hoping its as simple as MS says, install the CAS, point client traffic at that, everything keeps working, then its just a case of installing the hub transport, then the mailbox. And hopefully everything keeps running right on through up until someones mailbox gets migrated over to the 2010 mailbox server.
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Autodiscover? That only arrived in Exchange 2007 didn't it?
 
Think so yeah.

Performance wise for Exch, is there any need for the CAS/HT and Mailbox boot drive/log drive to be on fast storage? Or is it just the mailbox datastores that need quick storage?
Cant actually find any definitive information on the matter, it all just seems to be opinions, etc;
 
All the changes in Exchange 2010 have reduced the demand for IOPs massively and it's completely feasible to run an entire datastore happily on one disk. Of course it depends how happy you are on letting it carry out the replication necessary when drives fail, not to mention the topology of the network surrounding the nodes.
It is not advisable to run it on a single disk if the site is connected by ADSL for instance. :)

It's worth tapping the rough numbers into the exchange 2010 calculator:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/01/22/453859.aspx
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
All the changes in Exchange 2010 have reduced the demand for IOPs massively and it's completely feasible to run an entire datastore happily on one disk. Of course it depends how happy you are on letting it carry out the replication necessary when drives fail, not to mention the topology of the network surrounding the nodes.
It is not advisable to run it on a single disk if the site is connected by ADSL for instance. :)

It's worth tapping the rough numbers into the exchange 2010 calculator:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/01/22/453859.aspx
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Thanks, but thats just for the mailbox role...
 
BoomAM said:
Think so yeah.

Performance wise for Exch, is there any need for the CAS/HT and Mailbox boot drive/log drive to be on fast storage? Or is it just the mailbox datastores that need quick storage?
Cant actually find any definitive information on the matter, it all just seems to be opinions, etc;
Click to expand...

You are only going to get opinions really, getting that sort of performance info would be pretty vague as different orgs use email in different ways.

If you have a rough idea of how your existing exchange performance is tied to your hardware, you can fairly safely estimate that a similarly-placed server will outperform your existing exchange server over and above the increase in performance you would have gained just from replacing the hardware.

So, if you had mid-range servers in 2007/8 to put your Exchange 2003 environment on and mid-range servers today, you should see an increase in performance above what you would expect. In my experience it is quite dramatically faster but they have done away with some features that tried to keep the storage capacity requirements down to achieve that.

Basically, to summarise - Don't worry about IOPS from your storage, go with an approprate RAID setup and reasonable disks and be more worried about storage space.
 
DRZ said:
Basically, to summarise - Don't worry about IOPS from your storage, go with an approprate RAID setup and reasonable disks and be more worried about storage space.
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The question was basically asked as Exch will be sat on our SAN, and i have both a high speed and a 'low' speed disk group (15k x6 vs 7.2k x4).

Been spending the day reading up, MS's tech stuff is adament about setting up a seperate subdomain called legacy.company.com for 2003 only.
Is that needed?

I thought it was when 2010 CAS is in that could be used and can see the 2003 for OWA clients, then put the hub transport in, point traffic at that and then mail would be routed where the mailbox was, then the mailbox server and move the mailboxes, then remove 2003?
 
We got the CAS in last weekend, went quite smoothly.
At the moment its just sat there, configured & updated. Nothings pointed at it or looking at it at this point in time as when we try to log into OWA on it, it doesn't see the 2003 mailboxes for some reason.

Planning on doing the hub transport this friday.

Anyone got any tips for the HT installation, as depending where you read around, there's at least 5 completely different ways of doing it!
 
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