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