After upgrading to SP3 this weekend, the DB grew alarmingly and has continued to grow. This is an issue since the server was already undersized. Fortunately, a migration to a virtual environment has been on the agenda for a while so I decided this was a great time to do that, and add some hundreds of gigs of space for Exchange to play with.
Since I had the 2010 SP3 upgrade done, I installed a new 2010 SP3 in a new virtual machine and once that was done I could see both servers in the admin tools and everything looks great. The receive connectors and the send connector are still on the original machine, as are the mailboxes for now.
Could anyone chime in on how to finalize this move? The goal is to completely decommission the original hardware-based Exchange server once done. This needs to happen before it runs out of space, obviously.... :)
My plan is tentatively to:
- Move across all the user mailboxes to the new mailbox databases on the virtual machine overnight.
- Set up the same public IP's and receive connectors that exist on the original (the machine serves multiple separate domains in different external full IP's), and the send connector (after disconnecting the same on the old one, naturally.)
- Set up an updated security certificate that has the appropriate domains on the new machine.
- ?
Will the remaining settings stick with the new server if I bring the original down at that point and kick it out of the server room?
I'm talking about things like Activesync block rules for iOS 6.1 and so forth that I have earlier done on the existing machine and all the other stuff - accepted domains, e-mail address policies etc, are those dependent on the original server or have those settings been automatically shared on this new one that's connected to the same domain?
I'd appreciate some feedback on this, never migrated Exchange before so I'm a bit unfamiliar with the details - but I didn't have access to local expertise.