How to upgrade Exchange 2010 Standard to Enterprise

How to upgrade Exchange 2010 Standard to Enterprise

Recently I was looking at our Exchange 2010 and it was just growing wildly.

I had to introduce some measures to prevent things from escalating to a red alert.
I checked all mailboxes and which users were the culprit, but it is just the way most businesses use their mail system now a day. It is used for pretty much everything.

I thought about defragging the databases (we had 5 databases) and this is the limit for Standard Edition. I though, these databases must be fragmented.

I had a look at each database size and they were each larger than 100GB. To defrag a database that size it would take around 8 hours. I can’t have the server down for 8 hours.

I could create a new database, but I have used all 5 database limit for the Standard version.

I could move all users to a single database, but again this takes a long time, as each mailbox is over 8GB.

I had a look at the price to upgrade to Enterprise edition (it supports over 5 Databases), the cost was not prohibitive, and so I bought it.

Now I can create one database per department, I can move each user to their respective departmental database, empty the old databases and just delete them.

Once you create a new database and move few mailboxes, the new database will be smaller and faster, so no need to defrag and you can simply delete the old database.

Note: Be careful when moving mailboxes, Exchange 2010 generates a lot of logs, for each mailbox moved.  I would suggest keep an eye on your disk, the one which hosts the logs.

It is very easy to change from Exchange Standard to Enterprise. Just run the command below:

Command

Set-ExchangeServer -Identity “your server name” -ProductKey “your Enterprise key”

You will need to restart the information store service.

Note: I would recommend doing this out of hours, so the business does not suffer from a negative impact and downtime.

by Renato de Oliveira

Exchange 2010 Problem Exporting Mailbox

Recently I had a problem with our Exchange 2010 server. I need to export our mailboxes to PST files.
Whenever I ran the cmd command "New-MailboxExportRequest" it thrown an error message:

"There are no available servers running the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service"

There are many posts talking about similar error, some indicate the service "Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication" service isn't running. That was not my case!

Let me give you an idea of the system:

• Windows 2008
• Exchange 2010
• SP1
• Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication running and started

So the problem was somethingelse. I started looking at updates and rollups and I came across one post which indicate that one of the pre-sp2 roll ups was causing the problem.

I applied Exchange SP2 and I managed to solve the problem, but Exchange SP2 can also cause you some headaches.

Before you apply Exchange SP2, do your home work and check the potential problems, check also the requirements.

I started with the requirements:

• Exchange 2010 SP2 makes updates to the Active Directory schema
• Windows 2008 must be on SP2
• IIS requires the following modules:
• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
• ASP.NET 
• ISAPI Filters 
• Client Certificate Mapping Authentication 
• Directory Browsing 
• HTTP Errors 
• HTTP Logging 
• HTTP Redirection 
• Tracing 
• Request Monitor 
• Static Content
• If you use HTTP redirect, it will fail. Be aware, you will need to edit web.config
• If you have customised OWA web access theme, have a backup ready.

Take a look at the Links below:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529924(v=exchg.141).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529928(v=exchg.141).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh672189(v=exchg.141).aspx

I hope this will help you; if you have come across this problem, solve it. If you are planning in applying Exchange SP 2, just do some research and be aware of some of pitfalls.

Hope you enjoy it.

by Renato de Oliveira