Rebuilding our dead Exchange 2007 server

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Mann on September 23, 2009 at 12:20pm

Al,
The first thing to note is that Exchange 2007 RTM is not supported on Windows Server 2008. To install Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 you must run Exchange 2007 SP1. This service pack, as you may know, is a little different from previous service packs in that it is a complete installation of Exchange. Effectively SP1 is RTM with the SP1 code slipstreamed into it. Having established that Exchange 2007 SP1 is required to install on Server 2008, what other considerations are there?

Probably the biggest consideration is Active Directory. See the table below which sets out the different Domain Controller versions supported by different versions of Exchange.
Exchange Version
Domain Controller OS Supported

Exchange 2003 Windows 2000 Server SP4
Windows Server 2003 (All SP levels and R2)
Windows Server 2008 RTM
Exchange 2007 RTM Windows Server 2003 SP1 + SP2 (inc R2)
Windows Server 2008 RTM
Exchange 2007 SP1 Windows Server 2003 SP1 + SP2 (inc R2)
Windows Server 2008 RTM

See Installing Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 (click here)

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Permalink Reply by Al Carvalheira on September 24, 2009 at 4:34pm

More about Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2007 SP2 from http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/21/452567.aspx

Excerpt:

Since we announced the release of Exchange Server 2007 SP2, we've received a few questions about running Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2. We wanted to provide some additional information on how we made the decision to support Exchange Server 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 but not Windows Server 2008 R2. This decision is not one we took lightly and was informed by customer feedback.


Two primary technical points drove our decision to not support Windows Server 2008 R2. First, Windows Server 2008 R2, while an incremental OS upgrade, creates significant testing requirements for Exchange 2007. Because the Exchange 2007 SP2 engineering preceded the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, Exchange 2007 SP2 would have had to be delayed significantly to align testing schedules. Second, because upgrading the server OS underneath an existing Exchange server is not supported, the feedback we have received is that the primary need is to support Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controllers in an existing Exchange 2007 deployment, which we have done.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Mann on October 2, 2009 at 7:38am

Al,
About as much time will go into planning this project as will go in actually deploying it. I do not see anything in the documentation about having to run in compatibility mode. It looks like you need to start with a clean install of Windows Server 2008 R2. Make sure all the the prerequisites are installed which must be met as listed below:

.Net Framework v2.0 or 3.0
PowerShell RTM
MMC 3.0 (installed by default)
IIS 7 (Various components needed by different roles)
For a much more detailed look at the requirements for each Exchange server role see Exchange 2007 System Requirements.


So how do you actually get from Exchange 2007 running on Windows Server 2003 to Exchange 2007 SP1 running on Windows Server 2008 R2?

Unfortunately, although understandably given the massive architecture changes involved, you cannot simply upgrade Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2007 SP1 and then upgrade the OS to Windows Server 2008. This simply breaks Exchange completely!

Even when you have a clustered mailbox server, you cannot perform a rolling upgrade by upgrading one node of the cluster failing over and then doing the other node.

The only way is to perform a migration! In other words you must do a clean install of Windows Server 2008 on a new server and then migrate your data. Mailboxes can be moved using the Move-Mailbox cmdlet and public folder data must be replicated.

This has caused a fair amount of discontent on various online forums but it is the only way!

See this article. What you need to know about installing Exchange 2007 on Windows Ser...
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