Exchange 2010 to 2016 cutover migration

Liquidfox · 20 Jul 2017 at 15:31

Now we all know how easy it is to migrate Exchange mailboxes to Exchange Online. You create the migration endpoint, give a few permissions, click a few buttons and voila. You're syncing. Can this be done to another Exchange service? Ie our multi-tenanted Exchange platform we've got in our datacentre? It would appear that this lovely feature is a Exchange Online only thing, I expect in an effort to push people to their Exchange Online service.

As far as I can see the only option to do a move like this would be a cross-forest migration which isn't possible in this scenario as the source network is running SBS. Anyone else have any suggestions apart from doing it the old fashioned way?

LizardKing · 21 Jul 2017 at 14:47

I'd be tempted to get a 2010 or greater Exchange server up and running, migrate to that then out.
Otherwise if you have IMAP access you may be able migrate via that.

On the flip, at least you know your not migrating anything legacy with the pst method!

Liquidfox · 21 Jul 2017 at 19:54

I should have mentioned that the source server is SBS2011 so it's running Exchange 2010 already.

neil_g · 21 Jul 2017 at 22:06

Migrating sbs exchange to a higher version of stand alone exchange is pretty straightforward. Coexist them, migrate mailboxes and public folders, sort any certificates and/or Outlook anywhere and then decommission the old.

Presumably you'll be migrating the ad roles too, as you should as sbs should die a long slow painful death, just make sure you do that last. As not having the sbs as your master role server breaches licencing and it'll shut itself down.

Liquidfox · 21 Jul 2017 at 23:01

Normally, yes, that's exactly what we'd do. What we're doing here though is only migrating Exchange. Their SBS will stay live for the time being whilst we bring a new 2016 DC online and migrate AD onto that. The destination Exchange servers are external to the source, on a completely separate domain that is not going to be joined. Think of the destination as being 365 (ie it's multi-tenanted), but it's not hosted by Microsoft. It's hosted by us. It seems that in all their wisdom MS have left out the brilliantly useful migration features and kept them for only their Online platform instead.

It looks like I'm going to have to do pretty much what I did for a 2007 migration. Spin up a VM on our side, VPN to the source network, install Exchange management tools and export the mailboxes onto a share local to our destination servers and then run an import. There's leased lines at each end so it'll be easier to just export over a VPN than it would be to do a seed copy and then sync the changes.

Caged · 21 Jul 2017 at 23:20

Is there any money left in hosting Exchange for people in a way that isn't Office 365?

HoneyBadger · 21 Jul 2017 at 23:57

We still run an Exchange 2010 hybrid setup with O365. I'm about to get it up to 2016!

Liquidfox · 22 Jul 2017 at 10:44

Caged said:
Is there any money left in hosting Exchange for people in a way that isn't Office 365?

For us, yes. We've already got a sizeable infrastructure so it makes sense to make the most of it.

HungryHippos · 24 Jul 2017 at 23:14

Caged said:
Is there any money left in hosting Exchange for people in a way that isn't Office 365?

Unfortunately the future is whatever Microsoft push, and they are pushing their version of the cloud and not really leaving much space for others to get a piece of it without making it as hard as possible. Their focus is very clearly on improving O365/Azure at all costs.