As many of your will be aware the first publically available beta of Exchange 2010 was released on the 15th April 2009. Now between that time and now a number of really good articles have been released which explain how you can get up and running quickly with Microsoft’s latest offering of the worlds premier mail system, I alas have been a little bit lax in getting my own personal show on the road in regard to testing as I have had quite a lot on recently – however today I have managed to sit down properly and – from scratch began building my Exchange 2010 lab.

Now a lot of articles at the moment are focused around the actual install process of Exchange 2010 – which to be honest, aside from a few slight changes (to complement the rather large technology changes) there is little difference between 2010’s setup and Exchange 2007 (even at Beta Stage) – so rather than regurgitate what others have been explaining very well, I would like to focus more on explaining the requirements that your Windows 2008 server has to meet before you even consider installing Exchange 2010.

Microsoft have covered the minimum system requirements for Exchange 2010 which are located here: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/system-requirements.aspx – for those of us whom are testing within Virtual labs things like the the 4GB or RAM for a normal server plus 5MB per mailbox on a mailbox server can be relaxed a little bit – but if you are looking for good performance indicators within your testing you should stick to the recommended requirements.

My Lab (at this stage)

For simplicity at this stage – the environment that I have contains no other versions of Exchange (e.g. 2003 / 2007) and is made up of a single Windows 2003 domain controller.

My Exchange Servers are currently allocated 1GB of RAM – however this will be raised to 2.5 GB at a later point.

Installing Exchange 2010 Correctly

One of the first things that you will notice straight away is that some of the role and service pre-reqs have changed (just slightly) between Exchange 2007 and 2010 and indeed there is a chance the since this is a Beta release they might change again, but there are a number of additional Operating System components which are easily missed which are required before Exchange setup will run successfully.

NOTE:

• Some of you (like me) might have been used to using the pre-installation XML files from the MSExchange Teams website – please do not use these (at this stage) to get your server ready for Exchange 2010. Apart from the fact that some of the roles in Exchange 2010 have slightly different requirements – the ExchangeBase.xml file will install Powershell 1 by default which is not supported with Exchange 2010 – further within this article I have supplied and updated set for the Beta.
  
• You may have noticed that the Beta of Exchange 2010 is x64 only – thus far no news on if there will be and x32 release of this current Beta – therefore you will either need x64 capable hardware or a Hyper-V / VMWARE lab where you processor supports not just x64 but Virtualisation Technologies (such as Intel’s VT)
   
• This might seem obvious, but I have to point it out – please do NOT install Exchange 2010 into your PRODUCTION environment – remember that it is Beta software which may or may not be feature complete, this also means that it may contain issues that are yet to be found and fixed. Perhaps most importantly as this is a beta – the potential to do irreversible damage to your Production environment which you will not be supported with. Only TAP partners should be considering PRODUCTION use as this is supported by Microsoft and is completed under controlled conditions.

If you plan to successfully install Exchange 2010 with all appropriate roles on to a single server – It can be accomplished by installing the following in the order given as per below:

• Windows 2008 Server Service Pack 2 (this includes the following updates to Windows 2008 that you would have to download separately) – currently the completed Service Pack can only be downloaded by Technet / MSDN Subscribers so until they are released to the wider public you will still need to download and install them (see more on this later):
  
  
  • KB951725 – MMC Context Help Extension
  • KB950888 – RMS Client Sessions for a single user
  • KB9581178 – RPC RDR Interface for load balancing

To simplify the download process (as there is a little hopping between sites to get the above updates) I have provided the following PS1 script (which can run under PS2 when you have installed it) which when executed will download all of the above to your server and place them in a folder called c:\2010Support

Exchange 2010 – Windows 2008 Updates (including the Office 2007 Filter Pack) [1KB]

• Microsoft .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 (this can also be installed by Windows Update)
• Windows Remote Management 2.0 CPT3
• Windows Powershell v 2 CPT3 – please do not install POWERSHELL v1 this will create problems later on for Exchange setup
• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0
• Microsoft Office 2007 Filter Pack

(One could be forgiven at this point for thinking “This is a little more complicated than before”) – but remember, this is a pre-release of Exchange 2010 (and indeed some of the foundation technologies like Powershell 2.0 and RMS) – couple that with the fact that some of the patches that you have to install are also included in Windows 2008 SP2 its actually quite impressive that the install process has remained as painless as it is.

NOTE:

If you make use of Quest – PowerGUI as a scripting Editor – it will still function with Powershell V2 – just remember not Install Powershell 1.0 and install PowerGUI After you have installed both the Windows Remote Management 2.0 and Powershell 2.0, also note that at this stage the PowerGUI script editor does not support Exchange 2010.

In addition to the above you will need to install the following components (features) on your Windows 2008 server to support the Exchange 2010 roles (via serverManagerCMD):

• RSAT-ADDS (requires a reboot)
• Web-Server
• Web-ISAPI-Ext
• Web-Metabase
• Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
• Web-Basic-Auth
• Web-Digest-Auth
• Web-Windows-Auth
• Web-Dyn-Compression
• Net-HTTP-Activation
• RPC-over-HTTP-Proxy

As mentioned previously; the above (including the updates to Windows will cover the installation of all roles on a single server) – if you would like to streamline the install procedure on a per-role basis please download my updated copy of the Exchange Installation Pre-Requisites files from below (it is important to note that these files were originally created by the MSExchangeTeam and I have only modified them to work with the Exchange 2010 Beta – they may cease to work for the RTM and require and update):

Exchange 2010 Beta Role and Services Pre-Install Files [2KB]

And review the following chart (which does not cover UM) which explains which Operating System components and XML file from within the ZIP archive should be run against each server.

To use the XML files within the above ZIP archive – download and extract them to your Exchange Server and execute the following commands:

For a CAS Server:

Open a Windows command prompt and type:

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-Base.xml (you only need to run the Exchange-Base file ONCE per Server)

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-CAS.xml

For a Hub Transport Server:

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-Base.xml (you only need to run the Exchange-Base file ONCE per Server)

For a Mailbox Server:

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-Base.xml (you only need to run the Exchange-Base file ONCE per Server)

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-MBX.xml

For a Edge Server:

serverManagerCMD –inputpath \Exchange-Edge.xml

After installing the above on each of your servers – you are (and should be) in a good position to run through the install of Exchange 2010 without being interrupted.

If you would like a good overview of the installation process of Exchange 2010 please see the following link: http://www.exchangeinbox.com/article.aspx?i=133

I hope that you find the above useful.