Moving mailboxes or mailbox store is a piece of cake in Exchange 2007. Recently, I had to go through a task where the mailboxes need to be moved from one server to another in different datacenter. All that was required to do is copy the EDB files after checking for a Clean Shut Down state. Created same store names on the new server, marked the DB so that I could be overwritten with a restore, copied the old EDB files over the new DB’s in new server and mounted the database on the new server.

There it was. All mailboxes along with data moved to new server. The only thing left there after was to update the configuration of the mailboxes using Powershell to point to the new server. Thank you to the team at Microsoft for making this less painful compared to Exchange 2003.

Currently, I’m working on a project doing a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 which has approximately 1500 users. The goal is not only to upgrade or migrate to the Exchange 2007 organization but also to shift the entire organization to a new datacenter all the while keeping in mind to minimize downtime. This post does not talk about the migration plan, but about a small trick that was deployed.

When migrating to Exchange 2007 from an exisiting organization, Exchange remains in a coexistence mode unless all mailboxes are migrated to 2007 and the 2003 servers are taken out. This means that during the migration process some users would be having their mailboxes on 2007 while some may be having their mailboxes on 2003. Users accessing their email via OWA, Outlook Anywhere, ActiveSync, Blackberry or RPC/HTTP should not be affected during this transition.

To overcome this, I setup the CAS role on a Virtual while keeping the HUB and Mailbox role on a physical machine. Isolating the CAS allows Exchange 2007 to proxy the requests to the Exchange 2003 organisation. Users who have their mailboxes on 2007 are presented with the new 2007 OWA login from https://yourdomain.com/owa while users with their mailboxes on 2003 still need to go to https://yourdomain.com/exchange. In order to ensure things worked right for RPC/HTTP, webmail, etc. I wrote a script and put it under the Default Site. Here is the script:

Now accessing the URL which the users originally used to access Outlook Web Access presented the users with a new interface of OWA from Exchange 2007. Users who had their mailboxes on Exchange 2007 were given the OWA 2007 experience while those who were having their mailboxes on Exchange 2003 – the request was automatically proxied to the Backend Server and they were presented with the experience of OWA 2003.

Last week I had a lecture at DD University – Nadiad on Registry Editor and Tweaking Windows Registry.

Here is the link for the presentation file: Windows XP Registry Tips

Note: I’ve updated the download link after complaints that the PPT was not downloading.