I have been working for our organization for about 5 months now. Exchange is one of the elements that I have kind of avoided tinkering with as it works but I can tell there is something a little off. I was asked to build a windows 2012R2 Domain controller to take over our PDC, FSMO, GC, DNS, DHCP and Certificate Authority Roles. As I thought this is quite the task to undertake without really having a grasp on how things were previously built here. Documentation does not exist and several technologies have been custom rigged to work in our environment. At times I am impressed with the creativity. Other times I am frustrated by the unintended side effects. This may be one of those times.
All of the mentioned services except Certificate Authority (we do not have one) run on the DC we plan to retire. We also have a 64-bit Server 2008 R2 running Exchange 2010 Standard. I successfully built a 64-bit Server 2012 R2 Standard server and promoted it to a Domain controller with DNS using the post installation tools. After transferring the FSMO and adding the global catalog role to my new DC I was ready to start slowly transferring the other roles and decommissioning the services left on the old DC.
Long story short Exchange crashed. I backed out and re-migrated back the FSMO and GC roles to the old DC. Exchange came back up and I have done some further investigation. Our Domain was Server 2000 functional level and was raised to server 2003 functional level (we have a second server 2003 DC not GC) before the new DC was built. It seems our exchange 2010 standard server had static global catalog references that caused the exchange AD Topology service to crash when the transfer happened. I wonder if this was done as Exchange 2010 was not supposed to work with server 2000 functional level.
My request is for anyone to point me to simple documentation that will help me do two things.
- Ensure my exchange server is configured correctly before I start moving domain roles around.
- Provide me with a checklist of things to do to ensure exchange will work after the roles are all migrated.
Thank you for your help. I am really enjoying this project but since this is a live production environment I do not want to simply experiment until I get it right.
Michael S. Perra
Michael Perra