Alot of my customers are scrambling to get ready for Exchange SE (Subscription Edition) which requires Exchange 2019 CU14/CU15 for the in-place upgrade. Seriously, I've led 7 migrations in the past 3 months. The reason they're in a hurry is because Exchange 2016/2019 goes End Of Life (EOL) October 14, 2025. Exchange SE will be released early Q3 of 2025 (July-ish). See how very little time there is to perform an upgrade before you're out of support?
Another issue is Microsoft throttles mail flow from out-of-date Exchange Hybrid servers...there's no word yet on when 2019 CU14/CU15 will be throttled, but since it will be EOL, I'd assume it would come pretty quickly after 10/2025.
I'll write a full post later on how to upgrade/migrate Exchange 2016 to 2019, but for now I'm providing a guide I wrote in a Word doc, which you can grab from my GDrive here.
The guide contains things like network and directory requirements, server req's, pre-req's and the steps to install 2019 from start to finish. It also includes migrating Edge Servers, if you have those.
There are also two embedded docs for virtual directory settings and exporting/importing certs...let me know if those don't work and I'll send you the doc to your email. Also let me know if it's missing anything you can think of.
A word on Edge Servers: if you still have them, and you're in a Hybrid, now would be a great time to get rid of them. Can they be useful? Yeah...sorta. Are they needed in a Hybrid? No! With email, less hops are better, so if you're building new Mailbox Servers, it would be beneficial to update inbound NAT for SMTP (TCP port 25) to point to the Exchange 2019 Mailbox server(s) and remove the unnecessary management and complexity of your environment.
1 - On page 4, the Start Maintenance Mode Single Server page does not open when I double click on it.
ReplyDeleteimmediately set it into Maintenance mode to prevent it from causing client warnings. Are the following commands correct?
Set-ServerComponentState -Identity Exch-01 -Component ServerWideOffline -Requester Sidelined -State Inactive
Set-ServerComponentState -Identity Exch-01 -Component HubTransport -Requester Sidelined -State Draining
2 - "If you use DNS names for relay, you will need to update those records. "
So , If there are still printers and other things sending to it, one approach is to uninstall Exchange , shut the VM down, and then add that servers IP address as an additional address on the new server, so that you don't have to reconfigure any systems that have the old server IP hardcoded for SMTP relay.
Right? you can add this to the document.
3 - LoadBalancer can be added in the steps in the scenario. Is the order below correct?
"move all arbitration & AuditLog mailboxes to DBs on 2019, then either update the Load Balancer targets to direct clients to 2019
If you null'd out your SCP, re-register it here using the namespace URI (mail.domain.com) and not the server's FQDN.
4 - Lets say I will set SCP NULL for each newly installed 2019 exchange server. The SCP setting has been pointed to the FQDN address of the current server.
AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri : exch2016.contoso.local
When will the SCP setting point to 2019? After moving all mailboxes? In which step?
Also , I will set internal FQDN of the Exchange 2019 server for AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri ?