Exchange 2010 (SP1): Pre-Deployment Tips

I recently had the opportunity to experience all of the blood, sweat, and tears of migrating a minimally maintained Exchange 2003 infrastructure to Exchange 2010 (and mid-way through, an upgrade to 2010 SP1). All of the docs out on the web for migrations make it seem soooo easy. But if you are going to do anything other than a single server install and are doing things like, oh say; hardware load balancing, Exchange 2003 co-existence, or working in an old multi-domain forest then you are in for some punishment. I think I ran into every possible issue that you can have with an Exchange 2010 migration. One guide that helped me in this endeavor was the rapid transition guide from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. This guide didn’t cover every aspect for me though, here are a few things that may save you a little bit of hassle. I’ve been meaning to publish this for a while and I have a whole lot more notes from this experience but this is a start.

Run Updates = Rocket Science

So, I just recently tried to do some basic updates for ocs 2007 R2 by running the venerable “serverupdateinstaller.exe” found HERE. Thank goodness I setup a highly redundant load balanced farm of front end servers as the first server updated immediately had issues with the front-end services starting. Wow, updates strike again (other stories forthcoming soon, I promise).

Exchange 2010 SP1: DAG Node Maintenance

If you are performing maintenance on DAG nodes here is the process you want to go through (along with a slight caveat to fix a possible active copy move issue you may run into). In my environment I have three nodes in a cross-site dag.

All the commands below are run in an administrative exchange powershell prompt.

Exchange 2010 SP1: Web Services Fix

I’m utilizing 2 CAS servers behind an F5 load balancer and was finding that a migrated user to my new CAS array would get a red spat in communicator and get authorization prompts for the autodiscover url. I fixed it, finally, just today.

Microsoft Unified Access Gateway 2010 Notes

If you are new to the Microsoft Unified Access Gateway then you really should know some of these things I ran into while trying to get my array setup and running smoothly. Sure, to find my single post among the masses is probably not going to happen, but if you do find it before you start your endeavor then I promise you will be saved time and frustration. The first major frustration, the installation….