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transition to
Exchange Server 2013
Exchange Server 2013
migration guide
January 2014
Authors:
Konrad Sagaa (Microsoft Exchange MVP)
Robert Mandziarz (CodeTwo Admin, MCTS)
Table of Contents
2
Abstract
11
19
Abstract
The extended support phase for Exchange Server 2003 ends April 8, 2014 as announced on
TechNet Blog. Since Microsoft is going to stop supporting Exchange Server 2003 soon, many
companies are at the crossroads whether to migrate to a new email platform this year, or not.
Doing nothing and keeping an old email server regardless of the fact that it is on longer supported
by the manufacturer can be risky. On the other hand, the migration from Exchange 2003 directly to
Exchange 2013 is a complex and time-consuming project that requires a lot of research.
The main purpose of this paper is to give you a wider overview of things that need to be taken into
consideration when moving to Exchange 2013. We did our best to include as much information as
possible that could help gain a better understanding of what troubles you may bump into and what
should be done to avoid them. Finally, we described one of the ways of migrating from Exchange
2003 to Exchange 2013 that includes using one of our migration tools, CodeTwo Exchange
Migration. Following this path will help you avoid one of the biggest problems while migrating from
Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2013 - conducting the double-hop migration.
CodeTwo
Microsoft Partner (Gold Application Development competency) and
independent solutions provider for IT professionals dealing with Exchange
Server, Office 365 and Outlook. CodeTwo products streamline email flow
administration, enhance online collaboration and help system engineers
perform email server migrations. In 2013 CodeTwo launched two new migration
tools for Exchange Server and Office 365, which were acclaimed by portals like
MSExchange.org, and recommended by some of most recognized IT experts
from all over the world.
As the end-of-support date for Exchange 2003 approaches, it becomes clear that many Exchange
Server administrators already think about moving their companies to Exchange 2013, or Office
365. Many of them have already made final decisions and are right about to start the migration.
To support this thesis, CodeTwo conducted a survey on a group of IT professionals to find out
about their plans for the forthcoming months.
The survey was carried out between October 22 and December 23, 2013 and it was sent online
to a group of IT administrators working with Exchange Server on a daily basis. The response rate
was different in the case of each question, but in total 159 Exchange Server administrators took
part. Lets take a look at the results
Are you planning to migrate to Exchange Server 2013 within the next year?
Over a half of surveyed administrators
declared that they are planning to move to
Exchange 2013 this year, and more than 11%
of participants reported they had recently
conducted the migration to this platform:
Yes
No
I have already completed the migration
Budget
Technical issues
Data loss
Services availability during the migration
Staff has to learn new software
High time consumption of the entire process
Other (2%)
Are you going to perform the migration using your own resources,
or will you hire a 3rd party company / consultant?
Surprisingly, although administrators who took part in the survey feel there are so many things that
can go wrong, they are unlikely to have any 3rd parties or consultants conduct the migration for
them. The majority of them plans to carry out the migration all by themselves, or with a very little
help from their consultants.
Yes
No
Summary
The results of this short survey show clearly that although the process of migrating to Exchange
2013 is not easy to perform, many organizations are going to take that risk and make the transition
this year. The success of the entire operation will be determined by proper planning and the
usage of high-quality resources, including 3rd party software.
The next part of this guide will focus on possible infrastructure configuration problems an
administrator has to take into account while planning the transition to Exchange 2013.
Migrating email
to Exchange 2013 or Office 365
- environment preparation
By Konrad Sagala (Microsoft Exchange MVP)
What are the most important things you need to consider before starting the migration to
Exchange 2013 or Office 365? Although the specifications of server machines and hard drives
performance may be crucial for on-premises Exchange installations, local server infrastructure
isnt so important when moving your users to Office 365 - perhaps only in terms of integrating
your local Active Directory with Office 365 users database. However, in both cases the bottleneck
can be found somewhere else, e.g. at WAN or Internet connections quality. Network performance
is especially important in terms of additional Exchange Server features used by employees, e.g.
central management of calendars, company contacts, Global Address List (GAL), or delegation of
tasks. In the end Exchange Server isnt just only about email.
All pre-configuration steps required to prepare your existing Active Directory and server
infrastructure for Exchange Server 2013 installation are thoroughly described in the official
documentation of the product, especially in the Planning and Deployment part, as well as on
the official page of the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. You may also consider making
some calculations before you actually decide anything about your hardware configuration. Some
useful information on that topic, suggestions about physical placement of servers, as well as a
list of handy calculation tools can be found on Prabhat Nigams blog post on MSExchangeGuru.
com. To sum it up briefly, you can use the Exchange 2013 Server Role Calculator to specify such
important things as the number of necessary servers or the amount of needed hard drives. Please
note that the required amount of RAM for Exchange 2013 is twice as big as in Exchange 2010.
The Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator may also come in handy, especially when
you plan to change the architecture of connections (e.g. during Exchange Server centralization or
while switching to Office 365). It is also important to remember that before you actually begin the
calculations you need to determine how many emails (and of what size) users generate daily or
monthly.
Planning Office 365 deployment is easier than Exchange 2013 on-premises. Because Exchange
Online is located in the Cloud, you dont have to think about things like system scalability, or
its performance. In the case of Office 365, these things are completely covered by Microsofts
datacenter engineers. You can also use a rich set of documents and tools that were designed to
support the administrator during Office 365 deployment. The best place to start is the Office 365
deployment guide. You can also use OnRamp (previously known as Office 365 Readiness Tool),
which may give you some additional useful information on the environment setup. If you plan to
run a hybrid configuration and want to integrate your local Active Directory with the Cloud, you
may want to have a look at IdFix (DirSync Error Remediation Tool). This tool will help you identify
and resolve possible problems with Active Directory attributes that, if not eliminated, may affect
data synchronization between the local Active Directory forest and Office 365. If you migrate
from Lotus Notes, you will probably like to try the Online Notes Inspector (MONTI), which can be
downloaded from here.
Although the above mentioned tools may be helpful in the planning stage, they wont protect you
from unexpected problems with client machines you might encounter after migrating to Exchange
2013, or Office 365. Microsoft expects that your users will only use client software that is fully
supported by Exchange 2013/Office 365. Unfortunately, many companies still utilize Outlook
2003, Windows XP or even Windows Vista. Office 365 enterprise plans E3, E4 as well as SMB
can only work with Windows 7 (or newer). This automatically eliminates almost a half of the client
machines that still operate on the market. In addition, the clock is ticking and soon Microsoft will
withdraw support for Windows XP and related products, regardless of the fact that at least 30%
of the market still uses it. Even though Outlook 2007 is officially supported by Exchange 2013,
it doesnt allow to use all of its features as effectively as Outlook 2010 or 2013. In fact, Office
365 team officially suggests that only products with mainstream support should be used with
Office 365 (Learn more here). It means that Outlook 2007 may now work with Exchange Online,
but each new update in the cloud can change this situation in the future. You could try using
the web browser and Outlook Web App instead, which theoretically supports all of Exchange
2013 features, however, the release of the Cumulative Update 3 back in November showed that
Microsoft doesnt care about the limitations of Internet Explorer 8 (or even IE9!) and future updates
will presumably only focus on Internet Explorer 11 and Internet Explorer 10 versions.
While preparing your migration to Exchange 2013, no matter if its installed on-premises, or in the
Cloud (Office 365), you should analyze your environment first. Contrary to what you may think,
the biggest challenge is not connected with the server configuration but with the client machines.
It often happens that in large organizations administrators simply dont know which versions of
operating systems (and their Service Packs) and mail clients are installed. Some companies use
dedicated software to manage client PCs (e.g. SCCM or LanDesk), but you can also try a free
tool from Microsoft instead, which is called Microsoft Assesment and Planning Toolkit (MAP). The
program in its current version 9.0 has been just optimized for better compatibility with the newest
Microsoft products. It will help you investigate the workstations and prepare reports containing
some useful information about your environment preparation, operating system versions or Office
and Office 365 editions.
To sum up, the above-mentioned tools can help you easily address some possible problems you
may encounter during the migration. Using them, however, will not let you solve all of the issues
you may have, but it will definitely help you prepare the migration in a better way and identify
the parts of the environment that still need to be adjusted to Exchange 2013 and Office 365
requirements.
Tools in spotlight:
Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant
Exchange 2013 Mailbox Server Role Requirements
Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator
OnRamp for Office 365
IdFix DirSync Error Remediation Tool
Microsoft Online Notes Inspector (MONTI)
Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
Since Microsoft doesnt support the co-existence of Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2013, mailbox
migration between these two platforms is quite complicated. It doesnt mean, however, the
administrator cant do anything to make it more seamless and less time-consuming. There are
basically two options that are possible:
Carrying out the double hop migration, with Exchange 2010 pre-installed first
Moving users mailboxes between forests (cross-forest migration) with a 3rd party migration tool
Because the first option in my opinion requires additional work and involves too many resources,
I am going to focus on the second scenario, which makes the migration far easier and involves the
usage of CodeTwo Exchange Migration, a mailbox migration tool from CodeTwo. Heres a step-bystep guide on how to migrate from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2013!
Pre-migration
activities
STEP 1
Accepted Domains
Send/receive Connectors
Servers' Certificates
Default Email Address Policy
Internal/External URL's
Learn more
STEP 2
STEP 3
STEP 4
STEP 5
Migrate domain accounts between the Active Directory forests. You may do
it automatically using ADMT (Active Directory Migration Tool) or create the
accounts manually in the target forest. If you choose the manual approach
please bear in mind that the accounts' data like permissions' resources will
not be migrated.
Learn more
Make sure that the Administrator who runs the migration has appropriate
permissions on the source server and also has the target server Admin's
credentials. Furthermore, make sure that the target server Admin, whose
credentials are used, has proper access rights to the target server's EWS
service
Verify the following:
1. Domain Admins membership
2. Access to the target server's EWS service using IP or a Domain Name,
e.g. https://[Exchange_IP]/EWS/Exchange.asmx or https://[Exchange_
Name]/EWS/Exchange.asmx
3. If a Client connects to EWS from the outside of the local network, they
need to have the external EWS URL correctly configured:
STEP 8
Adjust the EWS Throttling settings and change the maximum size limit of
sent mail to decrease the time of migration processing
Verify the following:
1. Change the global message size limits on Exchange 2003:
STEP 9
STEP 10
.NET 4.0
Learn more
II
Migration
process
STEP 1
Make sure you meet the system requirements prior to installing the
software.
Exchange Connection - enter the source server's name and the mailbox
(source server administrator's MAPI profile that belongs to Domain Admins
group) the program will work under.
By default, these fields should be filled automatically.
If all data has been correctly entered, the source server mailboxes should be
listed in the main window of the program.
Learn more about troubleshooting the source server connection settings
STEP 2
STEP 3
Close the Automatch and the HTML windows. In the main window of
the program you will notice the Auto entry next to target mailboxes in
the Matching column.
If there are any target mailboxes that haven't been matched
automatically, you need to link them manually.
2. Manual matching
Once you confirm your choice, the given mailbox should appear in
the Target mailbox column in the source mailbox row within the main
window of the program (the Manual entry will show in the Matching
column).
In order to manually add other target mailboxes please repeat the
abovementioned steps.
In the Select target mailbox window that displays, make sure the
correct target server Admin's mailbox is visible. Then choose one of
the listed target mailboxes or enter the desirable one manually.
If the target server mailboxes are not listed please consult this article
STEP 4
STEP 5
Concurrent Connections
Address rewriting
STEP 6
STEP 7
Check if there aren't any new items in the source mailbox after migration
Once the migration is finished and you've noticed that some new items
appeared in the migrated source mailbox, just restart the migration using the
Rescan feature.
III
Post-migration
cleanup
STEP 1
MX records
Change MX records to enable mailflow to new servers. Please note that this
process may take several hours.
If any new items appear in a source mailbox while the MX records are being
changed, it is possible to migrate them after the records' migration process
is completed. It can be done via the Administration Panel of the program by
choosing the Rescan feature.
STEP 2
Troubleshooting:
For troubleshooting information,
refer to our Knowledge Base.
For additional resources,
refer to Frequently Asked Questions or give us a call.
To see how the program performs in action watch this
video presentation on YouTube
Activity
Pre-migration activities
Configure mail flow between the source and the target server
Configure the Administrators account on the target server (group membership, admins
permissions, enabled mailbox)
Verify the permissions of administrative accounts on the source and target servers
(Domain Admins membership, access EWS external address)
Verify if all components needed to run CodeTwo migration tool are present (WIC, MAPI
CDO, .NET 2.0 SP1 & .NET 4.0, System update for PowerShell)
10
Set the maximum number of concurrent connections with the target server
Start migration
Check if the number of migrated items in the target mailbox folder corresponds with its
equivalent on the source server
Check if there aren't any new items in the source mailbox after migration
Post-migration cleanup
Check?