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Exchange upgrade and Active Directory

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by adam a.

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We are looking to upgrade our Exchange Server from 5.5 to 2000. At this stage we are still an NT 4.0 network and not quite ready to migrate the entire network across to Windows 2000 with Active Directory.

From what I understand we can set up a limited deployment of Active Directory so that the 5.5 box can be upgraded 2000. But I'm wondering if it might be better to set up a separate Windows 2000 domain as part of our Exchange upgrade. I'm sure it's possible to set up trust between the twodomains and might even facilitate our eventual migration to a full Windows 2000 network.

Any ideas? I'm sure some of you have had a similar decision to make recently ;p

4 replies

by timwalsh

My two cents worth:

To create a second domain in order to install Exchange 2K, you will be doing 90 percent of what you would have to do to migrate your present domain to Win2K anyway.

The primary process of migrating an NT4 domain is migrating the PDC. Once the NT4 PDC is changed to a Win2K Active Directory (AD) Domain Controller (DC), you have an AD domain. You can have a Win2K AD domain without all the computers in the network running Win2K. You can migrate the remainder of your NT4 servers (including BDCs) when you are ready. You can migrate your NT4 workstations to Win2K Pro when you are ready. All your NT4 workstations and servers (to include BDCs) will continue to function properly (even though the main DC is running Win2K).

My suggestion would be to go ahead and migrate the domain now, rather than doing everything again at some future time.

Let me know if you need more specifics.

Hope this helps (and makes sense).

by shmaltz

I have been this before. There is no need to setup a second domain, in fact it might even create more problems. What I would do (and I have done it berfore), is upgrade the the PDC to AD, install Active Directory Connecter for the Exchange 5.5 Server, then I would either (depends on the resources you have): A) setup a new machine with Exchange 2000 and move all user to this Exchange Server. B)Upgrade the existing Exchange 5.5 server to Exchange 2000. A might be easier. Whatever you do make sureto have a complete system bakcup. Moving an Exchange Served to a new domain will be very hard to do.

by adam a.

Hmm.. thanks for the replies so far.

But I'd just like to point out that upgrading our NT 4 domain to Win2k is not a viable option for us right now =)

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