I'm about 4-5 weeks out from a migration from Groupwise to Exchange 2007. We are using the Quest tools for the migration. About a week ago, one of the consultants helping me with the migration had suggested considering a migration to Exchange 2010 instead of 2007. Her primary reason for the suggestion was to enable us to move to high availability down the road when we have the money for it.
We'll still have to temporarily migrate to 2007 using the Quest tools, but we'll move the users/mailboxes to the 2010 servers from there.
I'm willing and ready to be an early adopter of 2010 but there are a couple of things I can't find out yet. The documentation for 2010 is sparse and I've yet to see Standard vs Enterprise comparison sheet.
Our initial plan was to deploy 2007 using two servers (one CAS/Hub, one Mailbox) without high availability. Management didn't want to put forth the money at this time but was willing to consider it when we move to 2010. Now we are seeing that high availability can be added more easily with 2010 using DAGs. We're thinking that we can deploy 2010 now and simply add another Mailbox role down the road. This would be a lot easier than migrating to Exchange 2007 now and then later having to setup a whole new 2010 environment. That would require purchasing all new hardware instead of just one new server with 2010.
We've upgraded our Server 2008 Standard license to 2008 R2 Enterprise as the clustering components are needed. What I can't find out right now is if we'll be able to use Exchange 2010 Standard for CCR in the future or if we'll have to upgrade our Exchange version to Enterprise.
We have software assurance on all the involved software/licenses.
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Like you said, the DAG needs clustering so you have to use Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. But you don't need the Enterprise version of Exchange though.
You also have the option of using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition for your mailbox role, but keep in mind that all nodes of the DAG require the same version of Windows.
Even though the DAG provides high availability for the mailbox role, you need to also consider high availability for your CAS/HUB roles. In order to do this, you would need to deploy an additional server with the CAS/HUB role installed and utilize either NLB or a hardware load balancer. In your configuration, you would need to deploy a CAS Array and ensure that your databases use the CAS array address. Furthermore, you will also need to either make use of NLB or DNS Round Robin for SMTP high availability of the HUB Transport servers for any applications that need to relay.
Posts: 6812
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
Status: offline
Well you can only install Exchange 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 anyway so the version isn't an issue. If you want to use the DAG you need clustering so you have to use Enterprise Edition. So, not sure where you were going with that version advice.
Good advice on the HT/CAS though. The lack of enthusiasm for NLB within the Exchange product group is interesting.
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