Upgrade order

[Stuart Martin]

We have an NT PDC with 2 NT BDC's with Exchange 5.5 on one of the BDC's.
I want to ultimately upgrade both to Windows 2000 and then upgrade Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 but I wondered if anyone knows the best order to do this and will it all have to be done at the same time or can it be done over a period of time?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Richard Grakowsky]

Here's my two cents...

1) Upgrade the PDC to W2K as the first DC in your W2K domain.
2) Reload (not upgrade) the BDC that does not have Ex5.5 with W2K and wait for the DC's to sync.
3) Read about taking down the frist DC in your W2K domain, then reload the first DC with a clean installation.
4) Assuming that you still want Exchange on the DC, load Ex2K on one of the DC's. Stay in mixed mode (both domain and exchange) and migrate the 5.5 accounts to the 2K system. Read the white papers about this as it is a big deal to do this right.
5) Keep your last BDC with Ex5.5 up for a while so the user accounts can be adjusted to point to the new server. This will automatically be redirected on the client side as long as you keep the 5.5 server up.
6) Once you are confident that things are working okay, shut down the last BDC for a week or so to test your new setup. Once you are sure everything is okay, reload the last BDC machine as a W2K DC.

This is an overly simplified outline. There are many white papers that will guide you though the upgrade of your domain and of Exchange. They do not have to be done at the same time and I would suggest not doing them all at once. Do the domain and clean up all the issues that you run into with that and tackle Exchange as a separate project.

Oh, did I mention that you should do backups before every major step! :)

But that's just my opinion...I could be wrong...

Thanks,
Rick


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Stuart Martin at 9/24/2002 3:13:35 AM


We have an NT PDC with 2 NT BDC's with Exchange 5.5 on one of the BDC's.
I want to ultimately upgrade both to Windows 2000 and then upgrade Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 but I wondered if anyone knows the best order to do this and will it all have to be done at the same time or can it be done over a period of time?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.