Exchange 5.5 migration to Exchange 5.5 1

[SOKO]

Hi there, i will explain my situation first. I have Exchange 5.5 SP3 running on an old NT4 server and i have just purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2550 Windows2000 server. I want to install Exchange 5.5 on the Windows2000 server and move everything from the old NT4 server(settings, mailboxes, information store etc..) to reside on the new Windows2000 server. What is the best way of doing this?

I currently have installed Exchange 5.5 on the new Windows2000 server(no active directory installed) and joined the Exchange site residing on the NT4 server. Now that seems to work fine but i want to be able to move all mailboxes and settings to the Windows2000 server so i can shut down the old NT4 server. Is this going to work or do i need to go about this a different way? I want to have ONLY the Windows2000 server running Exchange 5.5 and shut down the old NT4 Exchange server but move everything to the new server first. Now is joining the site the way to go or should i be looking at doing this another way.

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

TY...SOKO

 

[brontosaurus]

What you're doing is fine. Just be aware that you need to rehome several other "system" folders and connectors before bringing down the old server. Check MS knowledge base for articles about removing the first exchange server in a site.

 

[Guest_imported]

Hi SOKO

I am doing the exact same thing. Moving Exchange 5.5 from NT to 2000 on new hardware. I will be carrying this out over the next couple of days. This is a first time for me too so if you want to trade techniques while we do it i would be more than happy.

You can get me at s.murray@indigovision.com

Cheers

 

[johnny99]

We did the same (except we didn't upgrade to win2k) and it worked ok.
One small thing that made our supportes a little mad was that after we pulled down the old servers there was a lot of users who had their Outlook to point to the old servers.
The problem was uses that hadn't been at work for a long time or when users switched places.

A simple thing that helped us was to make an entry in wins with the old server names pointing to one of the new exchange servers IP-numbers. That made Outlook get the new info from the new servers. Outlook keeps the name of the server that had the mailbox the last time.

/johnny

 

[SOKO]

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[DasNos]

I have the same situation, NT4 with Exchange 5.5 upgrade to Windows 2000 Exchange 5.5 (No AD)

Joined two sites, but cannot login as a test accout, keep asking for username, domain and password - Error -> Not enough Login Credential ...

However, if login as Administrator, it works just fine. So kinds stuck, and cannot move existing users over to the NEW Box ....

Any idea ?

Thanks in advance !

Yours,

DasNos

 

[Guest_imported]

This reply is for Johnny.

Wouldn't renaming the server to have the same server name of
the old solve the problems of the older users?

And as for migrationg the email boxes.. has anyone answered the question?

Is there just a synchonization of system stores ?
I know how to backup onto the new server... but
isnt there a way to do it without any downtime ?

 

[Bobob]

When we decided to move our Exchange 5.5 from one NT4 box to another at work, I read through lots of info from Microsoft, and after some irritating errors (and mistakes) I finally decided to take the "quick and dirty" way.
Since there were only 11 mailboxes on the old server, I installed the new server and duplicated the mailboxes and recipients (with some help from the export/import routines on the tools menu).
Finally all users exported their data from outlook to a .pst file, logged on to the new server, and imported their data again.
That might be a quicker way if you don't have many users.
Since then I've also installed Exchange 5.5 onto a W2K member server box in a AD domain, but I could not get it to work until I installed Exchange SP4 + the Exchange AD-connector. --
Robert

 

[johnny99]

We could have renamed the server back to the old name, but the the users who already had used the new server would have had the same problem.
Our shop is running 24/7/365 so we had to move every single mailbox when the mailbox owner was not at work.
And the old server had a name that was based on our old Netbios naming standards and we didn't want to keep that.

Public folders was first replicated to the new server and then later re-homed.

/johnny