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.
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.
Apparently, I was enjoying my birthday too much to notice that Microsoft released the New Office Visio Stencils. This stencil contains more than 300 icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office 365 deployments including Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.
This is from a comparison sheet I picked up at Microsoft Exchange Conference this year.