Windows/Exchange Server Migration Help

[FanIn80]

We have an old Dell server box we bought 6 years ago. It initially had Windows 2000 Server, which is how I inherited it.

About 2 years ago, I tore down the domain I inherited and built a whole new one, from the ground up, running Windows Server 2003. We also wanted to start hosting our own office email, so I threw an Exchange server (2003) on the same box, and away we went.

Fast forward to today...

I've talked the owner of the company into springing for some new hardware, and so I've decided to make the jump from Server 2k3 to 2k8 and from Exchange 2k3 to 2k7.

Any of you guys made this jump before? Setting up a domain and email server from scratch is usually easier than migrating an existing forest to new hardware. Any tips or things to watch out for?

My initial plan is just to rebuild the domain (from the ground up again) on the new box. Our AD isn't that big, so I don't mind rebuilding it. There are also some Blackberry Server configs still lingering that I'd like to not have replicated moving forward.

As for the Exchange server, I think it should be possible to move our 2k3 mailboxes over. I have some reading up to do on that. By first look, however, it seems like I'm going to try the "transition" route, instead of migration. I'm not sure...

[Superflyer]

I just migrated our exchange server from 2003 to 2007 but it stayed on server 2003. For that we installed Exchange 2007 on the new box in coexistence mode, got it setup the way that we wanted it and then migrated the mailboxes. Once that was done and everything was working fine I uninstalled exchange 2003 from its server.

We really had no problems with the migration which was really nice. We also have a BES server that we had to point to the new exchange server but for that we just stopped the BES services, migrate the BESAdmin account to the new exchange server, grant the BESAdmin account the needed permissions over the mailboxes, migrate the rest of the blackberry users to the new exchange server, restart the services.

If you need more details I can go into more detail.

[FanIn80]

Hey cool, I didn't even think about coexistence mode. Hmmm that might make things a bid easier.

[nik-]

nm >.<