Installing Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008

This is post is my attempt to bring all the materials of importance I could find about installing Exchange 2007 SP1 onto a Windows 2008 platform into one location. This post will be updated from time to time as new resources are made available. The known issues are slated to be addressed once Microsoft releases Update Rollup 4 for Exchange 2007 SP1.

Recommended Reading:

• Exchange Server and Windows Server 2008
• Exchange Server and Windows Server 2008, Part II
• Mission Impossible: In-place upgrade of Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008
• Release Notes for Exchange Server 2007 SP1
• What’s new in Exchange Server 2007 SP1

Known Issues:

• Offline Address Book (OAB) Generation Problem
• Endless logon prompts when using NTLM authentication
• Server 2008 backup is not Exchange aware
  • MS is working on a plug-in to remedy this problem.
• Exchange 2007 SP1 & Server 2008 Info
• An in-place upgrade of Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 is NOT supported. You will have to create a brand new server with Windows 2008 and then either use Database Portability or Move-Mailbox to migrate your users.
• Antivirus and Backups: It’s important to note that while most Antivirus and Backup platforms now support Exchange 2007 not everyone supports Server 2008. Check with your vendor before committing to a Server 2008 deployment.

Server Software:

Testing

• Trial download of Exchange 2007 SP1 available here. The trial software is only available is 32-bit.

Production:

• You will need to download a licensed copy of Exchange 2007 SP1 (Std or Ent) 64-bit.

Installation:

Pre-requisites

• Install the Exchange pre-requisites according to the guidelines here.
• For a new Install simply launch the Setup and perform the install in the same manner as you would with Windows Server 2003.
• If you are going to migrate your Exchange 2007 services from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 you’ll want to take a read this. There are some extra steps that you will need to undertake to ensure all the necessary services are migrated over correctly.

Post-Installation

• It appears that for now you will have to disable IP6 on the Exchange Client Access Server. Read more about this problem here. This issue will be resolved when Exchange 2007 SP1 Rollup 4 is made available in Q3 2008.

  To get right to it: (snippet taken from here)

How do you turn off IPv6 ? It depends on whether you are running CAS and Mailbox on the same server or different ones.

If you’re in a multi-server scenario where the RPCProxy is not on the same server as the Mailbox, then you need to do the following:

1. Unselect IPv6 from the properties of your NIC (on the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy machine); that will force the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy to use IPv4 to talk to Exchange and everything will be fine. In most cases, this step suffices. If it does not, continue with steps 2 and 3.
2. Under the regkey HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters, add a 32 bit DWORD with the name Disabled Components and value 0xFF
3. Reboot the machine

If you’re in a single-server scenario where the RPCProxy and Mailbox are on the same machine, then the above does not work since the loopback interface still uses IPv6. In this case, you need to make the following changes in the system32\drivers\etc\hosts file:

1. Comment out the line ":::1 localhost"
2. Add the following two lines:
   
   

• Adjust IIS7 authentication to stop endless logon prompts when using Outlook Anywhere with NTLM. Full details on this issue can be found here. The command to execute on the Client Access Server:

  %Windows%\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config /section:system.webServer/security/authentication/
  windowsAuthentication /useKernelMode:false

That’s about it for now. I’ll update this post from time to time as new information comes available.