New hardware, new OS, can I do this?

[ChuckCasey]

I have an NT4 environment with Exchange 5.5 on a member server. I need to move it to new hardware and want to upgrade 4.0 to 2000 on this server at the same time (I'm still keeping the 4.0 domain for now). Can I just take the current machine off line, then build the new 2000 server with the same name as the off-line one, install Exchange 5.5 and restore my data from backup? Or should I build the 2000 server, join the current site, and move the mailboxes and public folders over? The machine would have a different name, but I can deal with that. Any advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[Markus0815]

If you have the option, install your new 2000 server, join the site, move the mailboxes to the new server, and keep both servers running for a period of time.

When clients are connecting to their mail server, they will be auto-configured with the servers name, where their mailbox is located, no manual coniguration needed.

Of course, after taken the old server offline, the clients which have not connected within the period, have to be manually configured....

In general, with this solution you have no down-time at all, which could be an important factor when considering....

/Markus

 

[evz]

Markus is Right here. I have performed both methods of migrating to new hardware.

Just for info - you can't perform a backup from Exchange running on an NT4 server and restore it to a WIndows 2000 Exchange server. I have tried this, and the restore seems to work but the services will not start.

The first time I did this, I installed NT4 on my new server, restored exchange to the server - made sure it all worked correctly - and then upgraded the server to Windows 2000. This worked correctly - the only thing to watch for is on the first boot the Exchange database takes a while to be upgraded - and the service takes a few mins to start.

I did this using Arcserve - and the backup agent for exchange.

If you need to keep the server name the same - then you will have to do this sort of method - it's non destructive if you just take the old server offline.

but if you have the flexibility to be able to rename the server - then go with building the WIndows 2000 server from scratch - and migrating the mailboxes - it's much cleaner as you won't have any NT4 O/S left behind