Adding/Moving Exchange Server

For moving the mailboxes from the old server to the new server, I prefer the forklift migration procedure detailed in TechNet article Q199954. The biggest thing I like about it is that it leaves the old server entirely intact until you're sure you've done a good thing with the new one.

Using that procedure, it's not much trouble and since Exchange is about the most demanding product we run, I like to keep it on the highest performance server.

As far as a backup server, it can be essential if you need to do a single-mailbox recovery and you're using NT Backup or some other product that doesn't support brick-level backup. If you keep it built and at the same SP level as your production server, it's just a matter of restoring the priv.edb file from tape and then accessing and archiving the mailbox to a *.pst file that can then be imported to the user's live mailbox. This provides good disaster backup as well.

paul

Microsoft has written a knowledge base article on how to do this. Here is a quote from the beginning of the article
You may want to move all of the users from one Exchange Server computer to another, often during a hardware or software upgrade. If the server has a large number of users who have large mailboxes, the move may take an unusually long time if you use the Move Mailbox utility of the Exchange Server Administrator program in the usual manner.

You can "forklift" all of the user dataat once, if you physically move the Priv.edb file from one server to another. This significantly reduces the time that it takes to accomplish the entire move. This procedure is useful only if you move the users to a new server that does not already have user data on it, because it destroys all of the mailbox data that is already on the destination server.

Do not use this method to move public folder data. This method requires server down time. Allow at least two hours, plus any time that you need to back up, re

The biggest perfomance gain to be had with exchange is by moving the transaction log files to a seperate physical disk. When user1 sends a message to user2 the exchange server writes each message to a log file, and when exchange feels the system is quiet enough it then writes these to the database file. For the optimum performance the log files should be on a seperate disk, but to add redundancy these disks should be mirrored. This is probably overkill for your site with there only being 60 or so mailboxes. Moving Mailboxes is pretty simple, this can be done simply through the Exchange Administrator. When the Outlook client connects, it should detect the name of the new mail server to which the mail box is located. Many people forget aboutPublic folders when installing a new server. These should be rehomed (servername-public folder resources-[public folder-properties] Advanced tab- then change the home server property to the new server name. If there are any connectors on the old server (ie Internet mail