Upgrading Microsoft Exchange Server

August 3rd, 2007

Happy to note that one of our customers has reproduced their production active directory and their exchange 2003 server in a Replicate virtual lab, and is now rehearsing how to upgrade it to exchange 2007. They are dealing with many issues, like public folder migration, remote and wireless access, incorporation of third-party addons to exchange, and dealing with multiple sites, that resemble the issues their clients face, and are able to do it all with a real company’s worth of users and data. When rehearsing an upgrade, they generate two copies of the data store (one each under exchange 2003 and 2007). The email data store alone is over 70 GB, and each domain controller is over 10 GB, so the virtual lab will soon exceed 200 GB in size — our largest single vlab, and it kicks along nicely. It’s quite impressive to see the upgrade processes run in a completely repeatable and reliable way. Replicate’s virtual network, based mostly on FreeBSD vms, functions perfectly alongside Microsoft vms. It’s quite a demonstration of the strength of VMware’s virtualization technology as well.

For more detail on virtual testing of Exchange, visit Clone your Active Directory in 12 minutes using VMWare.

Entry Filed under: Software testing