Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 Migration

[Delphinius]

I am currently testing various methods of migrating from 5.5 to 2003. I have 3000 mailboxes to migrate and the exchange servers are in two seperate Domains. The 5.5 server is in an old NT 4.0 Domain and the 2003 is in a new 2003 Domain

Any ideas on the best way to approach to this?

Thanks

 

[Spirit]

What sort of AD structure are you implimenting?

How many Exchange servers are you migrating from and how many to?

Are you doing any consolidation.

What have you read from the MS website as we don't repeat their suggestions?

Iain

 

[Delphinius]

AD is already in place. We have merged with another company which is running on an NT 4.0 Domain with a single Exchange 5.5 server. We need to migrate this server to an exchange 2003 server in our domain.

We have been testing various methods in the lab, exmerge, the migration tool and so on.

I have read the migration guidlines etc. from Microsoft but was wondering if there was anyone that had already been through this that may have some advice.

Thanks

 

[Marcs41]

You may find some useful info at:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/deployment/2003.asp

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;exch2003

Marc
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[jwatnuv]

We ran the migration at my company about a month ago and our scenario was pretty much the same as yours. The easiest thing to do is follow the instructions from Microsoft and use the exchange tools to guide you through. The places where you will hit bumps are with custom attributes and public folders. Biggest things to be sure of are that make sure EVERY mailbox has a user account assigned to it. Then go through all of your public folders and check to make sure that there aren't any old SID's in the permission for these folder ie...deleted accounts. If you have old user SID's in your public folder permissions the you will run into BIG trouble when you do the pfmigrate because it will reset the permissions on the entire folder.

Make sure that you trim the fat from you users mailboxes. The migration tool takes long enough to run without having users whose mailboxes are 1GB, so where you can make those users either archive or delete there emails. We have about 2700 mailboxes and an 80GB information store so it took about 3 weekends to get everything migrated over. Just do groups at a time, make sure they work and if they do remove them from the 5.5 server. Best thing to do is take your time and do each thing one step at a time...build your new E2K3 servers...setup the adc (give it time to replicate) then start migrating the mailboxes.

Good luck!!