In my previous post on Upgrading from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 on Windows 2012 (Part 1), we covered the prerequisites to installing Exchange 2013 in your Exchange 2010 environment.  In this article we will cover installing Exchange 2013 and configuring it for coexistence.  For simplicity’s sake, I will show screenshots from a single “all-in-one” server installation, since they do not vary much.

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Microsoft announced the release of Exchange 2013 last fall, but this was not very useful to most of us, because there was no support for previous versions of Exchange until new Service Packs and Hotfixes were available. In other words, you could not install Exchange 2013 into your current Exchange organization. In February Microsoft finally released Exchange 2007 SP3 RU10 and Exchange 2010 SP3, to enable coexistence between the platforms. As is typical of Microsoft, they support an N-2 upgrade path. This means you can upgrade to 2013 from two versions back. Exchange 2003 (and prior) version will not allow upgrade to Exchange 2013. In-place upgrades of Exchange 2007 and 2010 versions are not supported either. This is typical and even if it was supported I would never recommend it. It’s nice to start from scratch and deploy a new Exchange environment and apply the things you’ve learned from previous installs.

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There is a bug in the creation process for Dynamic Distribution Groups (DDG) in Exchange 2010.  When you use the Exchange Management Shell to create a DDG and specify the Organizational Unit (OU) where the DDG should reside in Active Directory, you must also specify the –RecipientContainer to search for that DDG.  Otherwise the DDG Recipient Container defaults to the OU where the DDG was created.

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When making changes to Active Directory, like Schema updates, it is recommended to make a backup of AD. It is also recommended to perform these changes on an offline Domain Controller, perform your tests, and the only then replicate the changes to the remaining DCs. The topic of this article is about backing up AD.

NTDSutil provides a mechanism to perform backups on your domain controllers.

  1. Open an elevated command prompt and run NTDSutil.
  2. Run activate instance ntds to set the active instance to “ntds“.
  3. Type snapshot.
  4. Then Create.

For more details on NTDSutil: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753343(v=WS.10).aspx

 

One of my customers has Lync deployment with multiple sites and three Lync pools. If I try to use the Lync Control Panel to determine the number of users per site I am limited to 200 results. This obvious is not sufficient if you have more than 200 users in a site. Never mind that I think it’s shortsighted not to be able to modify the number of results in Control Panel, but never the less, PowerShell to the rescue!!! I took an old Exchange script and modified it to pull all users and group them by RegistrarPool and then sorted them by Name. Here is the little cmdlet.

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The star of last year’s product roadmap was Office 365. Microsoft this year looks likely to pivot from the public cloud to the private cloud, while also shipping staples like SQL Server and releasing major betas — and possibly final versions — of blockbusters including Windows 8 tablet, client and server, and Office 15.

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