Retiring Exchange 5.5
sites with Exchange 2003 SP1 Tools
There are still
tens of millions of mailboxes running on Exchange 5.5 today. Why?
Well the biggest reason is the migration process from Exchange 5.5
to Exchange 200x is one of the most difficult migrations an
organization will go though. The biggest complexity is because the
Exchange 5.5 directory must be migrated to the Active Directory; but
there are some key differences between the two directories. In
Exchange 5.5 a single user can be associated with multiple
mailboxes. In Exchange 200x each user account can only have a
single mailbox, although they can still be given permission to other
mailboxes. Another complexly was the lengthy process an
organization has to go though to actually consolidate multiple
Exchange 5.5 sites to fewer Exchange 2003 Admin Groups, at least
before Exchange 2003 SP1. Before SP1 there were only two options
available, the first was to export mailboxes to PST file and then
re-import the mailbox data into a new mailbox in the new Exchange
2003 site, which could be done with ExMerge. The second option was
to install an Exchange 2003 server in each 5.5 site and then move
the mailboxes to the new server. After all of the mailboxes are on
Exchange 2003 servers you could then retire the 5.5 servers and
switch to native mode. Once in native mode you would be able to do
migrate mailboxes across admin groups. Both of these options were
complex and required extensive time, planning, and coordination.
With the
additional scalability and availability options available to
Exchange 2003 a single Exchange server can now host over 4,000
mailboxes. In Exchange 5.5 it would have taken around eight servers
to host the same number of mailboxes. In addition, Outlook 2003
cached mode and network optimizations in Exchange 2003 SP2 and
earlier allows more clients to connect to a remote Exchange server
without increase the bandwidth to remote sites. Because of these
two major changes organizations still running Exchange 5.5 are
looking to reduce the number of Exchange servers they currently use
and consolidate administration to central or regional locations. In
order to do this they will need to migrate mailboxes from the legacy
Exchange 5.5 sites to existing Exchange 5.5 sites or a new Exchange
2003 site\admin groups.
Starting with SP1
you now have the ability to use the standard Exchange Tasks Wizard
in ADU&C to migrate mailboxes on a 5.5 server in one site to an
Exchange 2003 server in another site\admin group. The wizard
automatically creates the new mailbox on Exchange 2003, migrates the
current mailbox data, and removes the 5.5 mailbox. In conjunction
with the Active Directory Connector (ADC), that comes with Exchange
2003 SP1, both directories are updated so both 5.5 and Exchange 2003
users can still see and send e-mail to migrated mailboxes. While
this process is a lot easier than it was before there are still a
few pitfalls in the migration path that need to be addressed.
The biggest issue
is that Outlook clients will not automatically be updated to connect
to the Exchange 2003 server where their mailbox was moved to.
Luckily Microsoft provides a tool to address this issue. The
Exchange Profile Update tool (EXPROFRE) is a command line tool that
needs to be run on each desktop and under the context of the user?s
account associated with the Outlook profile that is pointing to the
legacy Exchange 5.5 server. The easiest way to have this tool run
is as part of the user?s login script. The script should include
some basic logic so it is only run for those users who have had
their mailboxes migrated. The command line switches for the tool
just need to point to a global catalog server and there are some
additional, optional, switches used to control Outlook settings.
For example the following command: ?exprofre
/targetgc=SRVDC01.domain.com /f /a?
would tell the tool to check the
SRVDC01
server, which must be a global catalog server, to see if the current
user has a mailbox on an Exchange 2003 server. If they do the tool
will update the Outlook profile for the currently logged on user.
The
/f
switch tells the tool to save
the user?s favorites and the
/a
switch tells it to save
the users off-line address book. Both of these switches are options
but without them both of these items will be removed when the user?s
profile is updated. You can download the tool, which includes
detailed documentation, from Microsoft at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=56F45AC3-448F-4CCC-9BD5-B6B52C13B29C&displaylang=en |
