Tuesday, November 2, 2010

From Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, what do you mean I can't install 2007 now?!

Exchange 2010 is out!  What?  It's been out for a while now?  I was planning a cross country move and .. ok that's not a good excuse.  Truth be told, I've been in government contracting world where they still run exchange 2003.  Come on.. how much longer can anyone really run Ex2003?  Even the government has hopped on the vmware band wagon with ESXi 3.5 and even 4.1 now.  Yet, still plugging along with a mail server almost a decade old.  I'm sure there is an upgrade of massive proportion on the horizon.. will it be to Ex2007 or the "new" Exchange 2010?  Did you know that if you stand up a Exchange 2010 server in your domain, you can no longer stand up an Exchange 2007 server?!  I can't take credit for this little tid bit of info.  Eva Soohoo of Convergent Computing was kind enough to school me on this little, but very important detail.  A little about Eva.. it's become apparent to me that Eva really brings things together for cco.com.  Convergent is known for their "unleashed" series of books such as Exchange 2010 "unleashed", SQL 2008 "unleashed", etc.. (you can go see for yourself at http://www.cco.com/Publications/tabid/61/Default.aspx)

CCO is just one of the things that Rand Morimoto does and generally gets all the press for things, but Eva deserves a lot of credit.  (oh.. and since I didn't clear any of this text with Rand or CCO.. Eva is most likely the one that'll be contacting me to take this down or they'll be suing me for something or other..lol)

Anyway.. back to the point.  If you're in a 2003 exchange environment like I know there are still a lot of... and thinking you'll skip 2007 and just go straight to 2010... you might want to stand up a 2007 box before that first 2010 box, just in case plans change.