Exchange 2007 Installation – continued (finally)

Some avid readers brought to my attention that I had promised an article on the minimum required for installation of Exchange 2007 in a default server config last week, and didn’t deliver.  Sorry about that, and here we go!

Once you’ve stepped through the pre-requisites for Exchange 2007 (see two articles back), you’ll be ready to run the installer proper for the Exchange system.  Today, we’ll focus on the setup for a single Exchange 2007 server holding all required roles.

Before you can install Exchange 2007, we’ll have to get AD ready to roll.  Previous versions of the Exchange installer had the /forestprep and /domainprep switches that could be run by Domain Admins who didn’t have Exchange permissions and didn’t want to give those domain privileges to the Exchange Admin. Exchange 2007 doesn’t have those switches, but instead segments out the different tasks into a set of 5 switches, each doing a specific prep job.  You have two choices here.  First you can get Enterprise Admin rights and just run the setup wizard.  Second, you can have someone with Enterprise Admin rights at the root domain and Domain Admin rights for each sub-domain to run the individual commands.  They can be found, and are explained, in this TechNet article. 

Once the domain and forest have been prepped, you can run the Exchange installer on the server where you want Exchange installed directly.  While there are various command-line and silent install methods, I’m going to focus on the wizard-based installation.

After you step through the welcome screens, you’ll be asked a few critical questions. From here on out, we’re going under the assumption that you’re running as an Enterprise Admin and that you’re doing everything (domain prep and all) at once.

You’ll need to define the Organization Name.  This is the Exchange Org, and not the company name or AD domain name.  Though the three names (Domain, Company and Exchange Org) may be related, the Domain Name and Exchange Org Name can’t be identical.  Choose something that makes sense, and doesn’t use any special characters – stick to numbers, letters and underscores.

You’ll also have to allow or deny permission for Microsoft to be informed about errors that Exchange sees, and you’ll tell Exchange if there are users on legacy Outlook clients (Outlook XP and 2003) and if there are 3rd-party MAPI clients (like Entourage) in the client-base.  Be careful here, if there is any chance that you’ll have non-Outlook 2007/2010 clients, use the legacy setting.  This creates a Public Folder hierarchy to handle administrative Public Folder tasks like the Offline Address Book distribution; even if you do not use Public Folders for anything else or you are setting up different Public-Folder Only servers.  Without the administrative folders, Outlook before 2007 will not be able to function correctly.

You will also need to choose what Roles to install.  The default is to create Mailbox (MBX), Hub/Transport (HT) and Client Access Services (CAS) roles, which are the three mandatory roles you must have in place for Exchange 2007 to run.  While you do not have to have these all on one server, each site has to have at least one of each of these roles running somewhere.  The default selection in the wizard will put these three roles onto the server you’re installing to, which is fine for smaller organizations.  If you have heavy MAPI users or a lot of users, you will want to install the MBX role only and put CAS and HT on one or two independent servers.  If that’s the case, select to install MBX role only here, and run the installer on the machine(s) that will host the HT and CAS roles and re-run the installer there, choosing the appropriate options as you go to install just the roles you need on each box.

The remainder of the installation is pretty much automated.  You’ll be able to watch the progress of each installation task, and as Exchange moves forward you will see a status report (with green check, yellow bang or red stop sign) as each is completed.  Hopefully, you’ll only see the green checks across the board.

While it is sometimes not required to reboot after the install, it’s not a bad idea to reboot anyway.  The reboot should be quick, and will ensure that resources used by the installers are freed up, and that all the services start properly.  Neither of those things is bad, and no one is yet using the server, so reboot, please.

For a default installation, that’s about it!  Next week, we’ll start talking about what the individual roles do, so you can decide if you want them on independent servers (or at all, for the non-required roles).  I’ll also endeavor to actually write up what I promise next week  And finally, for my non-Exchange-2007 users, I promise to do some articles on Exchange 2003 again in the very near future!