This is the Second Part of the Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Upgrade Series. in this article i will show you the upgrade process of Second Scenario of Exchange Server 2007 Deployments, which is "Cluster Continuous Replication - CCR".

Exchange Server 2007 has a new architecture based on server roles. Server roles organize Exchange Server 2007 services and features into preset server configurations. While Exchange Server 2003 provided primitive server roles in the form of back-end servers and front-end servers, Exchange Server 2007 has more granular divisions.

Hardware Requirements

Microsoft maintains a list of minimum hardware requirements to install Exchange Server 2007. Microsoft recommends the following minimum hardware requirements for Exchange Server 2007:

Processor:

• Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T). or
• AMD Opteron or AMD Athlon 64 processor, which supports AMD64 platform.

Memory:

• 2GB of RAM per server plus 5MB per user minimum.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is the latest release of the messaging and communications system from Microsoft built on the Windows operating system. At its core, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is an email, calendaring, and address book system that runs on a centralized Windows Server 2003 server system. However with the release of Exchange 2007, now the sixth major release of Exchange in the 12-year history of the product, Microsoft has made significant improvements in the areas of security, reliability, scalability, mobility, and unified communications. In this Article, We will list some of the New Features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, not a comprehensive list of all the new features in Exchange 2007, but It is intended to help you start testing and running Exchange 2007. For a complete list of all the new and improved features, see the Following Microsoft Site “Features of Exchange Server 2007”.

This is Part II of the Article Series of "How to Install MS Exchange Server 2007 on a new Server under a New Active Directory Domain/Forest". In this article we will start with Updating Active Directory Domain with Exchange Organization Information.

Prepare Active Directory Domain with Exchange Organization Information

In this step we will prepare Active Directory Domain with Exchange Organization Name and will create Exchange Server 2007 Containers under Active Directory Domain Partition. the New Organization will be created when the update process completed successfully.

Now after I covered the installation of Windows Server 2003 on a new server and promiting this new server to the first Domain Controller of a new Active Directory Forest/Domain, now its the time to install Exchange Server 2007 on a new server.

In this Article, I will talk about the actual deployment steps and procedures that you will use to install a new Exchange Server 2007 server with the Three Main Server Roles "Hub Transport Server, Client Access Server and Mailbox Server Roles" on a single server using the GUI installation tools. I will show you how to Prepare your Active Directory for Exchage Server 2007 Installation, and how to check the pre-requisites using a prerequisites scanner engine built into the Exchange 2007 installation program. Now I will start in Preparing the Active Directory Environment in order to host Exchange Organization.

How to Install Windows Server 2003 (Standard or Enterprise Editions) on a New Server

Requirements for Active Directory Installation on the First Domain Controller in your Domain

• NTFS Partition
  
  You must have at least one partition formatted as NTFS, preferably the partition you used to install Windows on which is C Drive, or if you decided to install Active Directory Database on a drive (Faster Drive) other than C Drive, then this Drive has to be NTFS Formatted Partition. Normally you choose to install or host Active Directory Database on another drive if you are seeking for best performance.
  
  To convert a partition (C Drive) to NTFS type the following command in the command prompt window:
  
  Convert c:/fs:ntfs
  

Introduction

There are some requirements for MS Exchange Server 2007 in order to be installed successfully. Without these prerequisites and requirements the installation will not continue. These requirements were covered in my previous article, but now I will brief these requirements again for the people who didn’t get the change to check my previous blog articles:

Here are some Recommendations and Best Practices for the placement of FSMO Roles under your Production Network.

These Shortcuts or commands for the people who loves working with shortcuts like me, to be honost with you, i forgot where is the location of Active Directory Users and Computers :) , whenever i want to access it, i ran the shortcut :). which is much easier for me to remember.

I want to share with you one of the issues that I found during Exchange Server 2007 – CCR Implementation. The issue appears while trying to configure FSW (File Share Witness) for the CCR, I don’t know if anyone faced this issue or problem before during his testing of CCR , but in case you didn’t , and you faced the same issue, I am sharing the solution of this issue with you in order to get over and solve this issue.

What is FSW ?

Introduction