Dear Microsoft Partner Support,
I have several questions regarding upgrading from Exchange 2010 to 2013 that I will list below, but first I’ll provide the existing configuration.
One Exchange 2010 SP3 server running on a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Dell PowerEdge R510 w/32GB ram. Operating system running on Raid 1 with two 500GB STATA drives. Exchange Stores and Logs on Raid 5 with six 1TB SATA drives. Two partitions on the Raid 5, one for the stores and one for the logs. One hundred user mailboxes, several large several around 30+GB, several over 25GB, but most under 20GB. All mailboxes with less than 100,000 items with a total of 100 mailboxes in two private stores. The private stores total 560GB and the Public store is about 65GB and growing. My client have several mail enabled public folders that receive around 350 email a day. Most clients are running in Cached mode but the users over 25GB mail boxes are not using cached mode. The Outlook client is 2007 for all users.
I would like to get your opinion on the following:
1. A step by step upgrade from 2010 to 2013.
2. Step required for employing a High Availability Exchange environment. Do I setup the first Exchange 2013 first, decommission the 2010, and then install the second 2013 Exchange server for High Availability?
3. Is it recommended to upgrading to the Outlook client 2013?
4. What are the suggested Hardware specifications? Is the current configuration of the Dell R510 sufficient?
5. Is running the server in a virtual environment suggested? If so what would be the redundancy specifications? Would I need two virtual server boxes with one Exchange server on each box?
FYI: My client doesn’t have a lab environment so this upgrade is a weekend project in the production environment. So a step by step plan is clearly critical.
Alex Samol