Exchange 2003 to 2010

[anything I don't mind]

I have two exchange 2003 to 2010 projects on at the moment. We have run in to a lot of problems with a mixed environment. Outlook problems where mail gets stuck in the outbox sometimes and weird problems if mailboxes are used across versions as secondary mailboxes etc. Then there are 4 systems that require serious updates when upgrading to exchange 2010 which makes moving mailboxes problematic if the support only goes one way. Has anyone else had these sorts of problems or has anyone done it with no interruptions or down time?

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

I have never seen an Exchange upgrade go 100% smoothly. Even in an identical environment, you will find bugs which hold things up. Anything from AD oddities, random errors with Exchange itself and junk which is lurking deep in the bowels of your Exchange 2003 installation. If you're really stuck, contact Microsoft directly and they will work with you to get a problem fixed for about £200 - which is basically nothing.

On the flip side, there is nothing stopping you from gradually moving everyone across and using groups of users as guinea pigs.

Without setting up a duplicate system and carrying out the migration in the shadows, I don't see how you could do an upgrade without some degree of downtime. If you have the budget for a duplicate system, do that.

 

[Shoei]

I managed to do a migration from 2003 to 2010 without downtime to the users.
Took it nice & slow, followed the Microsoft documents regards doing the migration. Hit a couple of stumbling blocks but never lost ability to send/receive. Did it over a couple of weeks.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I have two exchange environments and was lucky enough to get a different exchange guy at each site to do it and they both did it differently. The first one was done by making the 2010 the cas and primary server and creating the legacy.domain.com, basically migrating owa and active sync to the 2010 server and relegating the 2003 server to secondary servers. The other place has been done differently, the 2003 server remains the primary server and the 2010 server has no owa or active sync working during this transitional stage as the guy said he could create a new subdomain for 2010 but its better to just decommission the 2003 server as less work and better method.

Both sites i can move mailboxes across no problems. But we have software that relies on exchange, contact db and dms filing systems. These need to be made to work with the 2010 and service accounts moved across. There is no guarantee that 2003 users will continue too work after making changes to services. Then we have the blackberry and active sync mobiles that are impacted by moving mailboxes.

We had to stop moving mailboxes at one site because the users were still on xp and 2003 and this was leading to lots of problems after mailbox moves, we just rolling out 2010 and win 7 and the plan was to move mailboxes as they move across.

The other site i have to make all the changes on a friday night to the services and bes and then hope that 2003 accounts continue too work ok, otherwise we have to rush too move all the users across. We have to move the users anyway so im just going to try move everyone across.

The reason i asked is because I have to deal with this annoying project manager recently that was saying how the exchange project was a failure because we never met his project deadline. I tried to rationalize with the man but he said that he has seen other sites where exchange 2010 went through without any problems.

 

[NightShadow]

Ive done 6 Ex migrations in the past 2 years, the last 2003>2010 migration went superbly well, no downtime or issues encountered except a few issues with BB activations which was down to the previous IT company removing inherit permissions on the users.

2003>2010 before that had tons of issues, had to manually remove read and send receipts from old mailboxes due to sheer volume of them being classed as corrupt.

Generally no mail flow issues encountered in mixed environments so far, although if you are journalling with Mimecast it can cause some weird issues. Biggest issues I seem to have is getting Pub folders replicated properly, last migration was 2007 to 2010 and this is improved a lot now!

Recipe always seems to be ensure Ex2003 is up to date, clean up any old EX servers from AD if there are still traces, setup legacy names if using OWA and start with the lowest impact mailboxes to iron out any issues before getting to the directors mailbox! If you have installed Ex 2010 with latest SPs you shouldn't need to enable encryption in Outlook 2003 to get them to work so clients should carry on working without any manual intervention.

 

[Shoei]

2003>2010 before that had tons of issues, had to manually remove read and send receipts from old mailboxes due to sheer volume of them being classed as corrupt.

That & meeting requests. Had loads of those popping up errors when do the mailbox move from 2003 > 2010.
Didnt help that the users with the most were'nt around much.

 

[Gaz1988]

In the middle of a migration here at work also, currently running in mixed mode with mail being sent out both servers but recieved by ex2010. Our main issue is that users have historically been allowed to have unlimited mailboxs and suggesting we change this something a bit more sensible is out the question ('political' according to my manager), when we attempt to migrate one of these large (> 4GB) mailboxes our ex2003 takes a hit and seems to slow down access for the users who are still on the ex2003 servers. Our ex2003 servers also have the mailstores on the same drive as the O/S and application which is affecting performance/migration times.