My Exchange Server 2007 Migration Story

My Exchange Server 2007 migration is done. Whew! The whole thing took exactly 24 hours (9:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., Friday through Saturday). I moved from my old hardware—front-end and back-end Exchange Server 2003 systems, both Dell PowerEdge 2550, dual Pentium III 1.4GHz boxes—to the new single Exchange 2007 box, a Dell PowerEdge 2850, 2.8GHz Intel dual-core Xeon, with 8GB RAM and triple RAID 1 arrays. Overall the upgrade went very smoothly, and I had no major glitches but did encounter a few speed bumps along the way.

A couple of notes about my setup: We work with multiple SMTP domains, so everything is based on user principal name (UPN) logons. The default GAL is locked down, and instead we have multiple Exchange address lists and offline address lists with specific NTFS permissions for each separate domain. As you’ll see, our GAL and address-list setup has ramifications for the state of the address lists after Exchange 2007 is installed. I also opted not to install Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006—you can read more about that decision in the sidebar “ISA Server 2006—or Not?” . . .