Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Exchange 2010 was released last Monday, the 9th. Today, we have Saturday the 14th – and i’m done with the Migration to Exchange 2010.

Sure, there are loads of MVPs and TAP-Members that have migrated to Exchange 2010 a long time ago, but i’m still proud of this.

At a starting point, i had a Exchange 2007 SP2 machine, with one Mailbox database, no public folders and 35 Mailboxes that used up 25GB of space. Moving this is simple enough, but the issue is that our Exchange isn’t virtualized, and i couldn’t get my hands on new hardware since the current box was only a year old.

Since in-place upgrades are not supported, i needed a temporary server for the migration. I used an HP ML110 from the Lab, which offered enough space to migrate.

Another issue was BackupExec 12.5, which did not support Exchange 2010 yet. Fortunately, Exchange 2010 (and 2007 SP2) can be backed up by using Windows Server Backup. So my goal was to just let WSB backup to a file server, and have BackupExec pickup the files from there. This way, i will get a reliable, clean and supported Exchange backup, and still have it on tape.

To Migration itself was straightforward and easy. There’s already _lots_ of content on the web about Exchange 2010, most of it from the RCs or Beta of course.

I followed the Migration Guide from TechNet, which worked out well enough. Unfortunately, the iPhone does not support Exchange 2010/2007 coexistence, which made it necessary for several people to manually reconfigure their phone.

Removing Exchange 2007 worked without issues, but after moving all the Exchange 2010 data back to the real hardware and removing the temporary server i ran into the issue of moving arbitration mailboxes, which fortunately was already documented widely on the web.

In the end, upgrading from Exchange 2007 to 2010 while keeping the same hardware is not difficult, it just needs a bit more time.