Exchange 2000 Installation

Planning your Exchange 2000 Installation

It is more difficult to install Exchange 2000 than any other Microsoft product.  A list, as in shopping list, will not be good enough; you need you need a plan, as in planning a military campaign.

A further difficult with an Exchange installation is the setup menu is quirky.  It has several strange drop down menus unlike any other Microsoft program.

Here follow some advice from an independent consultant to help you install Exchange 2000.

Exchange 2000 Setup Tactics

Windows 2000's role in the Exchange 2000 installation

Before starting the practical aspect of installing Exchange 2000, you must decid your strategy and tactics.  If you have not done this see Exchange Migration.

Exchange 5.5 has its own directory database (DIR.EDB).  As a pre-requisite to installing Exchange 2000, this information must be transferred to Windows 2000's Active Directory.  Incidentally, Exchange 2000 also relies on Windows 2000 for IIS, the SMTP service, security and Event Viewer.

You may already realise that Exchange 2000 needs to alter the Active Directory schema.  This makes sense when you realize that a mailbox is now an attribute of the user, hence the user object needs extra attributes which translate to tabs in the user property sheets.

1. Simple install - just 'launch' setup.exe

If you are a small organization with one domain, all you need to do is logon as THE administrator, put in the CD, and Autorun will then launch the Exchange 2000 setup menu.  This is because the Administrator is a member of not only the Administrators group, but also a Schema Admin and Enterprise Admin.  (You can check this information by examining the property sheet of Administrator in Active Directory Users and Computers.)

  Get a test machine to install Exchange 2000, then you can practice with its quirky setup interface.

2. Install in stages:

a) setup /forestprep

b) setup /domainprep

c) finally plain: setup

There are two reasons why you may want to install Exchange 2000 in stages, security and the time it takes to run the first full setup.  The adage: 'The more security you have the more work there will be', applies here.  To install Exchange 2000 you must be a member of the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins. 

'Best practice' for high security companies recommends that the Enterprise Admins membership should be restricted and that only the MD or CEO know the accounts password.  'Best practice' also advises leaving the Schema Admins group empty until you need to modify the schema.  Well this is one of those occasions.  The solution is more to do with company policy than technical difficulty.  Create an account, make them a member of the Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins, Domain Admins, then logon and run the Exchange setup with the /forestprep switch. 

What setup /forestprep does is create the Exchange Organisation name in Active Directory, as well as modifying the users attributes to include a mailbox.  Setup /domainprep creates two new security groups Exchange Domain Servers and Exchange Enterprise Servers. You can inspect the new groups in the USERS folder of Active Directory Users and Computers.  The other benefit of running these switches early in the deployment is that it will save time later; allowing ordinary administrator to install the exchange binary files quickly.

3. Remember that the Strategy is Co-existence

What you want to achieve is a new Exchange 2000 server in an existing Exchange 5.5. site.  When you run setup on the Exchange server, you will need the name of an existing Exchange 5.5. server as well as the NT 4.0 service account name and password.  A final complication is that you may need to be an administrator in the NT 4.0 domain and this may involve creating trusts and adding the Active Directory installation account to the NT 4.0' Administrators Local Group.

Read all menus and error messages - extra   c a r e f u l l y.

Home Copyright © 1999-2008 Computer Performance LTD All rights reserved

Please report a broken link, or an error.