Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 [DEPLOYMENT] article

 

 This guide serves as a reference for small organizations or those with an extremely small budget, looking to deploy Exchange 2007 on a single server with Windows 2003 Active Directory services thrown in as well. Well, most of you may know that this isn’t always the best practice but in cases where hardware availability or budget is an issue, it’s not impossible to deploy in such a scenario. At worst, this guide may very well serve those of you who just want to deploy a test environment.

Many of you would know by now that Exchange 2007 is role based, comprising 5 roles :-

·         Mailbox Server Role – hosts user mailboxes (the only cluster-aware role)

·         Hub Transport Server Role – Internal and external mail routing

·         Client Access Server Role – accepts non-MAPI client connections

·         Unified Messaging Server Role – supports Outlook Voice Access and fax receiving

·         EDGE Transport Server Role – provides mail filtering

Please refer to the Microsoft web site or other references for a complete description of these roles as the above provides just a basic description.

Ideally, we would want to deploy these roles onto separate hardware but in this case, we’d deploy all the roles, except the Unified Messaging and Edge Transport roles on a single server. We do not need the Unified Messaging role in our environment and the Edge Transport role should be deployed on a stand-alone server facing the internet in the DMZ. The Hub Transport server should be configured to route all outgoing emails to the internet through the Edge Transport server and receive incoming emails from the Edge Transport server (which filters it first). In our scenario, since we are only deploying a single server, we will configure the Hub Transport role to send and receive emails from the internet, which is a supported configuration.

Operating system – Windows 2003 SP2

Exchange                – Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1

Architecture           =  Single domain forest, with one domain controller hosting Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server role, Client Access Server role and Hub Transport   

                           server role. 

Domain name      =  contoso.com

Server FQDN(Fully Qualified Domain Name) = KL-DC1.contoso.com

We will not be covering the domain controller setup in this guide and KL-DC1.contoso.com has already been configured as the domain controller for the domain named contoso.com. The forest and domain functional levels have been raised to Windows 2003. (Windows 2000 native or above to support Exchange 2007)

 

Installation Procedure

The following shows the desktop of the server to be installed with Microsoft Exchange 2007

 

1.       Run SETUP.MSI from the installation DVD. The above window appears. Notice that Step 1-3 of the Install section is grayed-out, this is because .NET Framework 2.0, MMC 3.0 and Windows Powershell has been detected as installed. Click on Step 4: Install Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 to continue.

 

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2. Click Next on the Introduction page.

 

3. Select to accept the license agreement and click Next.

 

4. I’m electing not to send Error Reporting messages to Microsoft, you may however select Yes to send them.

 

5. Selecting Typical in the Installation Type will install the Hub Transport, Client Access and Mailbox server roles (including the Exchange Management Tools) on the server. I’m selecting the Custom Exchange Server Installation option just to show you the options that are available in customizing the installation. Click Next.

 

6. Take note of the options that are available. We will select the Mailbox, Client Access and Hub Transport role (the Management Tools will be selected automatically). You may also specify the path for the installation. Click Next.

 

7. Specify the name for the Exchange Organization and click Next.

 

8. Exchange 2007 does not create a Public Folder database by default. The reason for this is that Microsoft has other solutions such as Sharepoint services which can be used for collaboration purposes, hence clients running Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2007 are recommended to use Sharepoint for document sharing or collaboration. However, Outlook 2003 and earlier clients require a public folder database to be available in order to connect.

I’m going to select ‘No’ and click Next.

 

9. A Readiness Check is conducted to see if the server is ready for the installation of Exchange 2007.

 

10.  At this point, if any of the prerequisites for the installation is not available, an error will be reported together with the recommended action. Ensure that all the prerequisites are fulfilled and click Retry to run the Readiness Check again.

 

11. Once the check is run successfully, click Install to continue.

 

12. The progress screen appears and will show the installation progress until completed.

That is the end of the installation process.

In the next part of this article, I’ll highlight the Management Consoles and the post-installation configuration options.