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

 

[slylittlefox]

If you're going to buy more hardware, I'd say put ESXi on the metal and then install the DC/DHCP/DNS in one VM, Exchange 2007 in another, and then finally a file server in another.

How complex do you want to make it?

As for moving the Exchange data, if you're going to be buying new hardware and can run both servers simultaneously, I'd try the NTBackup route first, and if that fails use Exmerge. Though I think I'm right in thinking Exchange 2007 doesn't support exmerge, or was it the Transporter Suite?

Alternatively, you can use VMware converter, make the current server into a VM, rebuild the box with ESXi (obviously backing up the VM (and the data separately!) first), and then build everything on top of that. But then you've got the problem of 64-bit... an excuse to go shopping at least

The ML115 is a good piece of kit and can be had for cheap.

 

[paradigm]

If you will be utilising new hardware, surely the simplest way would be to bring the Exchange 2007 server into the organization and just move the mailboxes over to the new server using the Exchange Management Console?

That's how I did exactly what you are doing when I migrated from Server 2003 / Exchange 2003 to Server 2008 / Exchange 2007.

 

[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 ??

 

[paradigm]

That's the way I'd go, except why bother making the original boxes VM's if you are only going to demote and remove from the infrastructure anyway?

Just boot up the ESXi server, create your new virtual servers, add them to the existing physical AD infrastructure and Exchange Organization, do your migration, then demote the physical boxes and remove.

No need for the conversion stage at all unless you have a problem with running more than one physical box at the same time?

 

[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.

 

[paradigm]

Ah, in which case, go ahead