Ideas for upgrading E2K to E2K3

[compnut]

I will be upgrading from 2000 to 2003 later this summer and I was hoping to get opinions from those of you who have upgraded from 2000 to 2003. Did you do an inplace upgrade (from exchange 2000 to 2003 and the upgrade the O/S from server 2000 to 2003), or did you put in a whole new box and do a move mailbox from 2000 to 2003? Also if anyone had any issues or problems during the upgrade procedure.

I have been doing some research and i know you can upgrade to 2003 and still have server 2000 installed although you lose out on the features that server 2003 can offer. However i will most likely upgrade the o/s after the email upgrade. But I am not sure if I should do an inplace upgrade or add a new box and use the move mailbox wizard since i am afarid something will go wrong upgrading the exchange and the server.

 

[rhoang]

I humbly suggest you get new hardware and do a concurrent upgrade. I am just now finishing the last of 6 Exchange servers from 2k to 2k3 (all in different sites). My first attempts of doing an in place upgrade went okay, but there were a few messy leftovers especially the virtual servers under IIS6. Also if you are using a Front End/Back End topology, you have to do the front end boxes first.

Moving mailboxes is easy after both boxes are up. Then once you are completely done, follow the instructions on "how to remove the first exchange server". sorry I don't have the link, but it's a comman thing if you run it on a search engine.

I'd be happy to share the horror stories if you are interested.

rich