Exchange 2003: Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) using vSphere vCenter Converter

exchange-2003physical-to-virtual

Planning on doing an Exchange 2003 physical to virtual migration to a new vSphere 4.1 host. I'm assuming that I will need to stop all the Exchange services prior to doing the conversion and running the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is also on my "this makes sense" list. I should note that there's just one Exchange Server in this environment.

Not seeing any real best practices/guidelines online out there. Can anyone recommend or outline the steps for doing this successfully?

EDIT

Just to clarify: I'm more concerned with ensuring that Exchange is a consistent/error-free state before attempting the conversion. I'd also like a method/process for testing this consistency, post-conversion.

As part of my testing, I was going to setup a workstation VM with an Exchange profile on the same ESXi host as the converted Exchange that's on the same subnet, but on a vSwitch that's not uplinked to the production environment. I was then going to open several mailboxes, etc. something like that anyways.

I was also planning on simulating mail delivery by setting up a Postfix/DNS VM with some test MX records, but I gather that without a domain controller, Exchange is likely not going to function properly in this isolated vNetwork, but that I don't know as my AD knowledge isn't great.

Best Answer

Not quite answering your direct question, but if I were doing it I would probably take a different approach, given appropriate capacity to do so.

What I would do is stand up a new Exchange VM and move mailboxes and services from your current physical box to the virtual machine. You won't get the "instant gratification" that comes with a P2V, but it's the only way to be absolutely certain nothing subtle has gone wonky in the P2V process. This method is also very well battle tested, and has been standard operating practice since pretty much forever.

An added benefit of this method is considerably less downtime for everyone, since only users whose mailboxes are being moved will be offline, and that will be a relatively short amount of time compared to a P2V.

All that said though, in theory if you dismount your Information Stores in an orderly fashion and do the P2V, it should go without a hitch.

Your idea of a testing the P2V in a separate vNetwork is not a bad one, but I'm not sure how practical it is. You will require a Domain Controller in the vNetwork because Exchange stores an awful lot of configuration data in Active Directory and is crippled without it. Exchange can also be quite finicky when it comes to being restored in a virtual DR scenario, but as always your mileage may vary (meh, if you do the exact same thing several times over I guarantee your mileage WILL vary!).

Related Solutions

Migrating to Exchange 2010 from 2003 hosted on a DC

The "swing migration" is typically done when upgrading one version of Windows Small Business Server (SBS) to another. You didn't mention SBS, and that migration method really isn't applicable in your situation.

You don't need a new domain to do what you're looking for. Hopefully you haven't gotten too far along with it and can start over, because you never want a multi-domain (or worse, multi-forest) Active Directory implementation if you can help it.

The migration from a single-server Exchange 2003 installation to Exchange 2010 is incredibly painless.

Join the server that will be hosting Exchange 2010 to your existing Active Directory domain as a member server. It's not recommended that Exchange be installed on a domain controller. I'll tell you that I've done it w/ Exchange 2007 before and it works fine, but it's not recommended and I've never tried it with Exchange 2010. If you want to make the E2K10 machine a domain controller, though, promote it now. (You really should have a dedicated machine to be a domain controller, and having at least two domain controllers is very helpful. You could continue to use the old server as a DC.)
Verify that your existing Exchange 2003 server has Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003 installed. If it isn't, install it.
Install Exchange 2010 onto the new server. (Obviously, if you need to move your mailbox database or transaction logs to specific disks do that now before you start moving mailboxes over to the new machine.)
Read up on using mailbox move requests to move mailboxes from the Exchange 2003 Server to the new Exchange 2010 server. It's a very painless process, and there's no configuration changes that will need to be made on the user end.
After all the mailboxes are moved and the users have accessed their mailboxes at least once via Outlook you can begin the process of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/152959">retiring the Exchange 2003 server.

Internet email will continue to flow in and out of the organization via Exchange 2003. You'll want to transition your Internet email flow to the Exchange 2010 installation, though. That will involve creating a "Send Connector" on the Exchange 2010 side, an anonymous SMTP receive connector, and changing firewall rules to divert the mail flow.

You'll also want to be sure that you've got OWA on Exchange 2010 available if your users were using it. That will probably involve firewall rule changes.

Is your backup management software ready to support Exchange 2010? If not, think about that.

You may want to read up on Exchange Autodiscovery. It can have ramifications for your SSL certificate and DNS infrastructure, assuming you don't want to get little annoying warnings from Outlook. Have a look at these for some good background (the second refers to Exchange 2007, but it hasn't change dramatically in Exchange 2010).

You'll definitely want to review Microsoft's documentation on upgrading and coexisting. I'm leaving a lot of little details out, but it's really a pretty painless process.

Need to Remove Exchange 2003 Server That Crashed During Transition to 2010

Remove the exchange server from the First Administrative Group first.

First if you haven't already promote the new exchange server as the master: go to Exchange System Manager > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Routing Groups > First Routing Group > Members Right click your new server and click "set as master"

To remove the old exchange server go to Exchange System Manager > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers. Right click the old server go to All Tasks > Remove server

if you get an error like this

    The Server "SERVERNAME" cannot be removed because:
-One or more users currently use a mailbox on this server. 
These users must be moved to a mailbox store on a different server 
or be mail disabled before uninstalling this server.
Facility: Exchange System Manager
ID no: c103f492
Exchange System Manager

Then Open AD and do a search for all users who have Exchange Home Server attribute set to the dead Exchange Server. Remove Exchange mailbox association if you find any users using the old server.

If you cannot see administrative or routing groups then: Right click your domain (exchange) container (THE HIGHEST LEVEL) go to properties check off the administrative views. "Display routing groups" and "Display administrative groups"

Finally: Delete all the old DNS records for the old server as well as any DHCP records then simply delete the old server from AD this is assuming you were able to transfer all the Schema roles.

Hope this helps.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Migrating to Exchange 2010 from 2003 hosted on a DC

Need to Remove Exchange 2003 Server That Crashed During Transition to 2010

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