Exchange 2003 Servers

Also, before you deploy Windows 2003 DCs into a mixed environment of Exchange 2000 and Win2K, it’s important to correct an issue with the InetOrgPerson attributes in the schema. Check out Knowledge Base 325379, “How to upgrade Windows 2000 domain controllers to Windows Server 2003,” for details.

Now you face a more difficult decision: the choice of an operating system to use for your Exchange servers. The myriad combinations of Exchange and Windows server versions quickly start to blur. Here are the combinations that Microsoft supports: n Exchange 2003 Standard Edition on Windows 2003 Standard Edition. This combination supports four-way Xeon hyperthreaded processors, RPC over HTTP, advanced memory tuning, IIS 6 application pools, OWA compression, and shadow copy backups. You can run this configuration in a Win2K domain, if you wish. Microsoft Exchange 2003 Migration Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition. This gives the additional advantage of eight-node clustering and eight-way processing. Don’t waste money loading more than 4GB RAM because Exchange 2003 can’t and won’t use it. Exchange 2003 Standard Edition on Win2K Standard Server. This combination is fully supported and works fine as long as you run Win2K SP3 or higher on the Exchange server and all DCs. You won’t get support for four-way Xeon multithreading because Win2K assigns a CPU license to each virtual processor, and Win2K Standard Server only supports four processors. Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition on Win2K Enterprise Server. Technically, this combination is supported, but the only feature that Win2K Enterprise Server brings to the table in this situation is two-node clustering with inferior memory management compared to Windows 2003, so there’s hardly any reason to consider this as an alternative. california exchange microsoft migration server The following combinations aren’t supported and shouldn’t be implemented, even if you can come up with a workaround: Exchange 5.5 on Windows 2003 Exchange 5.5 on Windows 2003. If you try to install Exchange 5.5 on a Windows 2003 server, you’ll be blocked at the outset by a warning message from the OS. If you try to upgrade a Win2K server that already has Exchange 5.5 installed, you’ll be notified by Windows 2003 Setup that Exchange 5.5 isn’t supported. Exchange 2000 on Windows 2003. Yes, I know that you’ll hear stories that you can upgrade a Win2K server to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2000 “works great.” You can believe those stories if you like, but do you really want to put your production Exchange servers into an unsupported configuration? I say no, and I’m sure you’ll agree. Microsoft Exchange Server Recovery

Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003 Web Edition. The Web Edition of Windows 2003 was designed for Web services and doesn’t support any version of Exchange. With all this in mind, you have a limited set of in-place upgrade options. You can’t do an in-place upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, even if you have Exchange 5.5 running on Win2K. You can upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003, but make sure you’re confident of your change control. You don’t want applications running on the Exchange 2000 server to cause compatibility or security problems when married to Exchange 2003. GroupWise to Exchange Migration back up

If you run Exchange 2000 as a component of Small Business Server 2000, you can do an in-place upgrade to SBS 2003. If you run Exchange 5.5 as a component of SBS 4.5, Microsoft has a 48-page document detailing the required steps for replacing an SBS 4.5 server with an SBS 2003 server.

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