Hello all, I am planning on upgrading my Exchange 5.5 server to Exchange 2000. Can someone who as done this already give me any tips or lessons learned?
thank you
Dennis Hixson
MCSE (2K), MCSA, MCP, CNA, A+, Network+, Server+, i-Net+, CIW, CCA
One caveat to an inplace upgrade is that if for whatever reason the upgrade fails, you need to remove the failed installation, install 5.5, restore from backup and begin again.
The recommended method is the "move mailbox" method. Here is an article that describes this method
316886 HOW TO: Migrate from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange 2000 Server
The most common cause of failures during an inplace upgrade or migratin are DNS issues. You will want to confirm that you are pointed to internal DNS servers and that forwarders are configured to point to the outside DNS servers.
291382 Frequently Asked Questions About Windows 2000 DNS and Windows Server
Marc
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Some good articles for sure. One thing I have not been able to find (even though it is the Microsoft Recommended update) is a link or article on the "Move Mailbox" method. I see the "Swing" Method. I see the "Migrate" method. Anyone have any articles on the "Move Mailbox"?
I basically just went through this... Make sure you do lots of planning. This shouldn't be a quick or lightly taken mission dude to the multitude of things that can go wrong.
Depending on the current domain name of your NT 4.0 network, you may be forced to change it. I was... this made things alot harder because I had 60 clients then that had to be added to the new domain... which also created new profiles on the w2k pro clients, so I had the daunting task of going to every client and moving profiles over and adding the system to the new domain.
I had 2 NT 4.0 servers running. A PDC (file & print server) and a BDC, Exchange 5.5 and MS-SQL 7.
Here is what I did in the run of Friday to Sunday Migration
Friday Morning, ran the defrag utility on the exchange 5.5 server databases to make sure the data I was going to migrate migrated cleanly. At 4:30 (when the office shutdown) I started swapping drives from my servers. Lucky for me I have 3 identical servers with hot-swap drives, and 2 new larger drives for a hardware upgrade at the same time.
Windows 2000 server is alot bigger than NT 4.0. Almost 1Gig for the operating system alone. Be sure you have enough space before you start.
I shut down the PDC and removed and installed new drives. (This way if something went wrong, switching cack to the NT 4.0 is much much easier). Installed Windows 2000 Server and set up the new domain and all the software and settings I needed including DNS and Service Packs. Then I installed the Active Directory Connector and Exchange 2000 and Service Pack 3 for Exchange. Meantime the Exchange 5.5 server was still running so I started the migration from the 5.5 to the new 2000. I had over 110,000 items to transfer and figured it would take approximately 6 hours to complete. So I went home and go some sleep.
Next morning I came in and found that the migration had stopped because I ran out of disk space. For some reason I made an 8 Gig partition instead of the required 80 Gig I planned on. So I scrapped it and started again. Oh ya, if the migration fails, and you run it again, it will duplicate all the messages calendar and contacts that were successfully migrated up until the error... Be sure to not let that happen, I'm still deleting duplicates.
Once I got the system all transfered, I also moved the MS-SQL 7 db to the MS-SQL 2000 db. This was alot smoother.
The nice thiong about the migration wizard is it will create an account on the new domain for every user that has a mailbox. Very Nice!.
Downed the NT 4.0 BDC and replaced the drives with my last 2 new drives and set up Windows 2000 service packs IIS and evrything I needed. Removed the drives from the other 2000 server and replaced the original NT 4.0 PDC drives and copied all the user data back over. Setup all the groups and permissions, shares.
This is a big job and shouldn't be jumped into. I did this migration this way so that I didn't loose any of the original data and could step back if things were going bad.
I suggest setting up a test network and install 2000 server a couple times and migrate data over to it from exchange a couple times before you actually go fo it.
I ended up working 127 hours in 8 days... brutally exhausted. Vacation will be nice.
Sounds like creating a new domain is a bunch of headaches. Would have been much smoother if you were just keeping the existing domain and doing an upgrade. Thank goodness I won't have to go through your nightmare :} as we will be just upgrading our existing domain.
zoeythecat,
I wanted to keep the existing domain but it was only 3 letters and it wasn't a .com domain name... so Win2K forced me to change it so I used our internet domain name... when the network was originally set up the organization didn't have a internet domain name.
Just a note in general, your 2000 internal domain name does not HAVE to be the internet one, it is even more complex if you make it the same.
mydomain.lan or mydomain.local are far easier setups.
Hi,
I have plan to help my friend to migrate from nt4/ex5.5 to W2k/ex2000 (different domain)also. Is it easier to create trust relationship between two domain and then shutdown the PDC?
How about the exchange account? Do users still have access to their email accounts when we change domain name from internal domain name to external?
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