Posted on: November 21st, 2011 by Famous Phil
Most of the Matthouse infrastructure is running on old Celeron processors and limited RAM, you may laugh at me, but that hardware has been very reliable and has lasted Matthouse for the better part of 3 years, and some of it may continue to power Matthouse well into the future! But there are some applications out there that require a little more juice to run well, and (unfortunately) Exchange falls into this category. I say it is unfortunate since the Exchange server hosts a handful (< 10) mailboxes, yet it costs quite a bit to maintain compared to other Mail Transfer Agents (MTA). So anyways, this blog is dedicated to the procedure that I took to migrate Exchange over to brand new, shiny, fast hardware.
First, I had Server 2008 R2 Datacenter as my operating system on both the existing server (denoted double) and the new server (denoted ruby). The servers could clearly communicate with each other within the same datacenter as well so that file / data transfers could be effective. The first thing to adding any server is to give the new server a name and know its network configuration details ahead of time. I’m not going to go into details about how to install Windows, since it’s pretty simple. Just make sure that you have the correct drivers installed for your server after the installation completes.
Note about installing Windows: just so that you don’t run into any issues with your system, make sure that your primary hard drive is attached to the first port for your motherboard’s interface, in my case, the first hard drive was connected to SATA 0. If you don’t do this, you’ll run into a lot of problems and waste a lot of time (like I did!). In addition, make sure that your BIOS has AHCI enabled prior to installing Windows, this also caused problems in my scenario. Once Windows is installed, make sure that you can disable write caching on your hard disk without the operating system freezing (in computer management, under storage, right click the disk and optimize for quick removal). If you followed the above, this shouldn’t cause Windows to hang, and will prevent Active Directory from incapacitating your system during the restart phase of the installation. In addition, this is a good time to name your computer, join it to some default workgroup, add remote administration features, and change the time zone / clock settings.
Before continuing, I’d also recommend disabling Internet Explorer’s advanced security features; this is done by going to the computer management main screen and scrolling down, finding IE ESC and turning it off (acknowledging all of the warnings). If you keep them on, you’ll find yourself doing way too much work to download necessary applications, etc. These features are only useful if you plan on doing general web surfing on the server (which I would not recommend for security reasons). I also activated windows, ran all the necessary windows updates (several reboots and optional updates as well). After this all has been done, I ended up rebooting the machine a final time.
At this point, I installed several applications (using IE to get Google Chrome initially).
Tags: active directory, exchange, exchange 2010, migration, owa, Transfer, upgrade, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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