Exchnage 2003 reinstallation

[elcephus]

Hello,

A little background first. I have my Primary DC Controller on the same server as Exchange and I am looking to put the two on seperate servers. What is the best method I can use to get this done? I plan to load Windows server 2003 on an HP DL145 and put and restore AD from some backup data. After that how would I go about restoring the exchange infomratoin from backup tape?

 

[nsantin]

Why do this? Why not just install the 2nd server on the box you want then copy the mailboxes over. Plus you could then use the 2nd server as a failover is need be (especially if you have 2 public IPs, setup the "empty" server as MX2)

 

[elcephus]

The reason I am doing it this way is because the second server is going to be a lower end server and since we dont have that much people in our organization AD will work fine on it. Plus, when you demote a DC to a member server and if you had Exchange installed on it some of exchange functionality will not work.


I'm still looking for the best practice in this regard.

 

[TravTrav]

Are you keeping the original server name for the DC or Exchange server? If youre going to keep it for Exchange, I would recommend just doing a disaster recovery install. Here is a link to and MS KB article describing how to move Exchange to new hardware and keep the same server name without a lot of hassle:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=822945&SD=tech

Hope this helps.

Travis

 

[skialta]

As for the "AD restore from backup data", when you run DCPROMO to install the new box as a DC, the AD database is brought over...no need to restore at all.