Verify permissions. As I explain in Part 1, you must have Exchange Full Administrator permissions to upgrade an Exchange 2000 cluster. Applying service packs, however, can cause permissions to be reset to their default values. Before and after you apply a service pack, verify permissions on the administrative group in which your EVS resides. (By default, Exchange System Manager—ESM—doesn't show security settings. To enable the Security tab, add the REG_DWORD entry ShowSecurityPage to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\ExAdmin registry subkey and set the entry's value to 1.)
Test upgrades. Create a parallel test environment so that you can try out service packs, hotfixes, and third-party products before deploying them in production. (Many third-party products aren't supported on clusters and might require some customization to work properly.) Exactly replicating your production configuration might not be cost-effective, but consider implementing a test cluster that uses virtual server technology, such as VMware, to test third-party products. Cluster-aware third-party applications create cluster resources in Cluster Administrator; you can move these resources between nodes as failover operations are performed. For third-party products that don't create cluster resources, however, be sure that you can automatically shut down and start the products on cluster nodes during failover and failback operations. . . .
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