Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013

[NokiX]

Hi All,

 

I am currently looking to move from Exchange 2007 running on a 2003 server to 2013 on a 2012 R2 server however before doing so I wondered if anyone else has attempted a similar upgrade themselves. Our domain controllers are running 2008 R2 so should be able to handle both exchange servers running simultaneously without any disruption but if anyone has had any experience with this sort of large upgrade any advice would be helpful!

 

A side note is that we can upgrade to Exchange 2010 instead if this upgrade will be simply too much hassle since the admin staff don't like to have any sort of email down time at all and I know that 2007-2010 upgrades are not too painful.

 

Thanks.

[Oaktech]

Part 1: Step-by-Step Exchange 2007 to 2013 Migration - GD Bloggers - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

Have a shufty through that...

[truebluesteve]

Hi All,

 

I am currently looking to move from Exchange 2007 running on a 2003 server to 2013 on a 2012 R2 server however before doing so I wondered if anyone else has attempted a similar upgrade themselves. Our domain controllers are running 2008 R2 so should be able to handle both exchange servers running simultaneously without any disruption but if anyone has had any experience with this sort of large upgrade any advice would be helpful!

 

A side note is that we can upgrade to Exchange 2010 instead if this upgrade will be simply too much hassle since the admin staff don't like to have any sort of email down time at all and I know that 2007-2010 upgrades are not too painful.

 

Thanks.

 

I was looking at this myself a while back and actually decided that cost wise it was better to go to Office 365, even though I was reluctant for a number of reasons. We did the migration in December and its been great. Have you considered it at all?

[NokiX]

I was looking at this myself a while back and actually decided that cost wise it was better to go to Office 365, even though I was reluctant for a number of reasons. We did the migration in December and its been great. Have you considered it at all?

 

We have considered it however we have an EES agreement with Microsoft so all the licenses are part of the fee being paid so upgrading exchange doesn't cost us any more that it does already. It is something we have and will still strongly consider since although it's nice to have everything on site it would be one less server to manage which makes the job a little bit less stressful!

[truebluesteve]

Yes - someone else can manage the updates and so on! We had the issue where we would also need to replace the hardware (we are virtualised but didn't have the spare capacity to add a beast like Exchange) and there was also the anti-spam and AV licenses costs to add. The other consideration is the size of the mailboxes - up to 50GB each, which is way more than we could provide.

[NokiX]

We have quite a lot of storage available from a past upgrade so storage isn't an issue although currently we do limit staff to 500mb of space and pupils to 200mb. Currently the exchange server is also a physical server so that is why the storage is limited but the new server is going to be a virtual machine so storage isn't an issue.

 

I'm not sure about our AV though as the network manager set the original exchange server up but I believe our AV server covers that along with all the PC's as well although that said I still like the idea of 365 it just depends on the budget we get next year!