By Michele L. Deo

With the constant changes of technology happening almost every day, corporations struggle to keep on top of the updates and ensure that their infrastructure remains bug free.  The more changes that happen, the more Service Packs, hot fixes and major release all of us happy IT people look forward to testing and deploying!! We struggle daily in juggling the mission critical applications with the potential of maintenance upgrades, and if we ignore them all together we either get the standard customer service response "Have you upgraded?" or even worse a disaster strikes and your systems are down.

In our industry it's always been easy to go out to the vendor websites and bring down the latest service pack and/ or the latest hot fixes, test them out and then apply it to our infrastructure without any concern at to how it impacts the environment.

Beware! The interdependencies of the Exchange 2000 infrastructure are now becoming more complicated when it comes to updates.  You can't just apply MS Exchange Service Pack2 into your existing co-existent MS Exchange environment.   There are certain steps that you MUST take before updating.  Did you know that you need to:

1. Update all your Active Directory Connector servers first, then
2. Update all your Site Replication Servers and Bridgeheads/Routing Group Master's second
3. Then the rest of your servers (Exchange mail stores, Public Folders, etc).

If you don't do the upgrade in this order, you will be subjecting your infrastructure to some major replication issues.

Did you know:

•  Exchange 2000 SP2 contains fixes for nearly three thousand issues reported since the initial release of Exchange 2000.
 

•

•  SP2 contains fixes and enhancements that will facilitate a less complicated migration and enable mailbox migration timeframes to be met.
 

•  SP2 increases the performance, stability, availability, and functionality of servers running Exchange 2000.  

If you are migrating from Exchange 5.5, these particular fixes within Exchange Service Pack 2 are important to your organization:

  Massive updates to the RUS (Recipient Update Service) which has been known to not apply changes to objects and abruptly halts a mailbox migration.

  Eliminates the issues with a replication storm hitting the Active Directory Connectors, which allows you to increase the number of mailbox moves that can be migrated at one time.  Lessons learned: Don't change all the connection agreements to never and then all at once change them to replicate.  This will create a replication cycle that may result in two objects being created due to multiple connection agreements updating an object at the same time.

  Those of you who have multiple storage groups may have noticed that the Exchange 2000 server crashes when there were multiple storage groups mounted.  This issue has been eliminated with this Service Pack.
 

I recommend that you pull down the Service Pack notes from the Microsoft website and really read up on the process to install this Service Pack.  It is definitely different than what we are use to in the earlier versions of Service Packs, especially if you are in a co-existent environment as you are migrating your large corporation from MS Exchange 5.5 to MS Exchange 2000.

Microsoft link to Service Pack 2: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/deployment/2000/SP2Deployment.asp