RE: Mixed environment design- any issues?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Aaron S (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 05/12/04 

Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 06:46:04 -0700

I had the same questions a few months ago when I upgraded our Exchange 2000 servers to 2003. The best way to think of Exchange 2003 is to think of it as a big service pack. I had called MS support about some of the questions that you had and thats what they told me. You will have to run the /domainprep and the /forestprep commands and yes it will extend the schema and make some changes but the changes were not even noticed to the users or the admins. You probably won't notice a thing when you run the commands. As far as compatibility... we ran in mixed mode for about 2 months without any problems. Meaning e2k and 2003. On weekends we moved mailboxes over to the new exchange 2003 server. Users didn't even know it.

Not that you need to do this first but we upgraded our domain to 2003 first before I did the exchange migration. from what I understand Exchange 2003 will work fine in a 2000 domain however you can't install it on a 2000 server which was the biggest pain in the ***. Over all the hardest part was just creating a 2 SMTP connector so that both exchange servers can send and receive mail internal and external but even that was easy. The upgrade is easy. Exchange 2003 is much more stable than 2000. We have a lot of virtual memory problems with 2000. When we upgraded those problems were gone. Good luck!

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