Running migrations of Exchange is always a slow process, especially if you run into problems or hickups along the way. I’ve done my fare share of migrations and know a few basics to being with outright;
- Always migrate to a different server. Never do an inplace upgrade. I don’t even know if this is possible anymore for lack of trying
- Everything always changes, for instance I spend a good amount of time to figure out the hub transport role was gone. It’s now completely integrated into the controls.
- Exchange 2013 without SP1 is not compatible with Server 2012 R2. This will result in issues on the connectors not working properly or at all.
It’s usually pretty straight forward. I run Exchange in our Private Cloud which means I deploy VMs. So I make a new VM named “Exch2013” and start the process of moving the new stuff onto it. But if you are anything like me you want to update and test stuff first.
Before you even begin to do anything I recommend you >download and install the newest CU. Make an updates folder somewhere on the machine and pop this guy in there. I would also grab the newest UM Language packs and put these in this folder as well. Once this is all said and done I found that installing via the “unattended” command-prompt will yield the best feed-back on errors and also on time left in the installation. Setup.exe takes alot of possible input, running the following command will show you all of that;
setup.exe /help:install
I usually install “vanilla” on alot of functions because I setup my mailboxesdatabases at a later state. I used to following command to run the install.
setup.exe /m:install /r:ca,mb,mt /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /InstallWindowsComponents /UpdatesDir:”C:\Updates”
After the installation is complete I create a new database on the server using the new ECP menu. To get to that goto the following URL https://exch2013.example.local/ecp/?ExchClientVer=15 this allows you to see the new menu in a Multi-platform environment straight away.