Install Exchange 07 on server 2003 or server 2008?

[glamprecht1]

Our current structure is...
2003 Ad with multiple sites. The remote sites are very small.
One 2003 Exchange server on server 2003.
Will bring up two new exchange 2007 servers on a yet to be determined OS.

I just purchased two new books on exchange 2007 and each book goes into great detail about installing, managing and configuring Exchange 2007 on a windows 2003 64 bit server. My initial plan was to install Exchange 2007 on server 2008 so that I would not have to revisit this project for several years.

What OS do I want to use here? It sounds like most people are still installing on server 2003 and have not made the leap to 2008 server. Is there a reason for this?

What would you recommend? For what it is worth, we currently do not have any 2008 servers running in our domain. Everything is windows 2003 minus two 2k servers.

Thanks in advance for your valued input

 

[58sniper]

Well, hopefully, one of the books you bought was the one I helped right...

Anyways, there are some technical advantages to going to 2008 for Exchange, but you have to determine if you're comfortable going to the new OS. Why not lab it out and see how it works? I'm all for going with 2008.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Zelandakh]

2008 is new and is therefore not as familiar. It allows 2007 to utilise all of the features and is faster.

2003 is tried and trusted and we all know how to configure it.

If you want to leave it for many years, either OS will do - there are still deployments of NT4/Ex5.5 out there chugging away. We have come a long way since those days, but they still work.

 

[nicolasvdb]

The only downside is Windows Server 2008 Backup Utility isn't Exchange aware, so you will have to rely on third-party based backup products like symantec backup exec 12d or others.

 

[glamprecht1]

Yeh...I am just a little bummed out that the books...
"Microsoft Exchange server 2007 Unleashed" and "Exchange Server 2007 adminsitrators pocket consultant" seem to focus on server 2003. It may have been snipers post that pushed me to those ...
I was planning on using server 2008 and did not think about that kind of detail when ordering the books. I guess that it is still a little early to expect full scale adoption of server 2008 and reference material to go with it.
Anyway thanks......

 

[ShackDaddy]

You could start checking out some of the SBS 2008 books, since they cover Exchange 2007 running on Windows 2008.

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[Zelandakh]

Well those books never claimed to be about Windows Server 2008 and were both written before 2008 was out.

Both are superb books written by highly knowledgeable authors and will allow you to get Exchange running extremely well.

For the underlying subsystem, they will help but they are not Windows manuals nor do they profess to be such.

The Windows Security Resource Kit 2008 book is a great read on how to understand the product. Annoyingly, I finally got an acknowledgement and they spelled my name incorrectly...

 

[glamprecht1]

Thanks for everyones responses. I think that i will continue on with server 2008 over 2003 for this deployment.

Thanks

 

[58sniper]

Well those books never claimed to be about Windows Server 2008 and were both written before 2008 was out.

Agreed. We did good to cover SP1 for Exchange in our book, and that was long before 2008 came out (although SP1 added support for 2008)

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Zelandakh]

Anyone would have thought you had access to toys that weren't available publicly... <wink>

 

[58sniper]

Well, we did, but you can't write about how things work in alpha and beta builds, and expect it to be the same in RTM!

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/