Home Test & Training Domain

[DustyMiller]

At home I have an old P4 820D 3.2 Ghz server running with Server 2003, and Exchange 2003. Now I want to upgrade it to Server 2008 & Exchange 2007, however there is no iplace upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Server 2008 with my current hardware. As Exchange 2007 is 64bit only. (I know there is a 32bit for eval & testing but I dont have that via MAPS).

So my only real soloution is to do a full rebuild onto new hardware. Now i have @ 8 clients at home, and really want to use some of the newer tools like System Centre Protection Manager, and other new tools. Is there a better way, or do I have to do it the hard way. And with my small ammount of clients what the best way to move the exchange data, exmerge to .PST, or backup and restore ?? Storage space is not an issue, the server will be held on a mirror pair of 320Gb disks, via a hardware raid card.

I was also thinking of building the server and then shoving Vmserver on top for the server roles, and hosting the roles via vmware ???

Open to your suggestions chaps & chapesses.

Cheers

Dusty

 

[DustyMiller]

OK, have kind of decided to build a VSXi server, convert my current server to a VSXi image, run it up on the new VSXi server, and build two new virtual servers, one for the new 2008 DC, and one for the new Exchange 2007 box. Then migrate the mailboxes, and then demote the old 2003 DC, and then remove the Exchange 2003 server from the organisation.

How does that sound ??

 

[DustyMiller]

I am going to upgrade my existing hardware, so will need to vm image my existing server to move into the new VSXi enviroment.