Have you looked into the new Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 Migration tools?

The new Exchange deployment tools walk you through a typical fresh install or help you when implementing an Exchange 5.5 migration. The steps involved are the following:

Phase 1

• Verify that your organization meets the specified requirements.
• Run the DCDiag tool.
• Run the NetDiag tool.

Phase 2

• Run ForestPrep.
• Run DomainPrep.
• Run Active Directory Connector Setup.
• Run Active Directory Connector tools.

Phase 3

• Run Exchange Setup.

Have you run into issues using these tools? Are you happy with the changes Microsoft has made to help with more successful installations?

More information on the Deployment tools can be found here: http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=271E51FD-FE7D-42AD-B621-45F974ED34C0&displaylang=en

More information on the Deployment process can be found here: http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=77B6D819-C7B3-42D1-8FBB-FE6339FFA1ED&displaylang=en

Yes, I have had some trouble in our test lab with these tools.  They havent exactly lived up to their promise of automating a 5.5 to 2003 Exchange migration.  HOWEVER, we are realizing that some of this might be due to a corrupt DNS database.  We will be rebuilding our testlab and trying again.

I should also point out that I am pretty inexperienced with Exchange beyond basic administration.  This will be my first migration, and I understand that 5.5 to 2003 Exchange isnt the easiest thing to attempt either.  Any help or insight you could offer would be helpful to me!

I noticed this thread and thought I'd reply with our situation...not to complain, but to get the ball rolling in this thread.

After doing several live 5.5 to 2003 migrations with this tool, I can tell you a few more things that you need to make sure you get right.

1)  Be sure to have ONE account per mailbox on your Exchange 5.5 server before even starting the migration.  And make sure the account and mailbox names are similar enough for ADC to be able to match them.  Spending time up front with this will greatly reduce the frustration later.

2) Read ALL of the logs that these tools produce and address EVERY error in them.  If you don't address them when you get them, you may find you have issues later.

What problems did you have in the test lab?      

Here is another article you can check out:


http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/upgrade55to2k3.mspx


Z

Would you believe that after I submitted this post last night that I was able to solve the problems?  We were getting (what I consider erroneous) DNS issues that were preventing name resolution.  We were also getting errors with DCDIAG and NETDIAG claiming the RPC server was unavailable.  Symptoms of the DNS issue.

So once DNS was resolved (completely unrelated to Exchange, so I'll spare you the details), the utilities made the transition in our test lab easy!  We did have a problem at the very end when migrating the actual mailbox data into the new Exchange 2003 server.  One of the mailboxes failed.  However, rerunning the same utility a second time imported the data with no problem.  It was strange, but not worth getting too upset about since simply rerunning the utility did the trick just fine.

btw... I was hoping you could validate a decision I made early on here... we were presented with several options to install Exchange 2003, and we narrowed it down to "Co-Exist With Exchange 5.5" and something along the lines of "New Exchange Server" for environments without any Exchange at all.  I chose Co-Exist since we'd be importing directly from Exchange 5.5, although we have no intention of leaving the 5.5 machine online once the migration is completed, so maybe co-exist isnt the proper term for our situation.  Did I make the right decision, and is there anything else I'll need to do to the 2003 server?  And if you could make a recommendation about efficient options to migrate multiple clients to the new Exchange server without manually moving each over one at a time (scripting, ADMT, etc.) I would appreciate an experienced opinion.

Once you have the Active Directory Connector in place and the new Exchange 2003 server built you will be able to use Active Directory users and computer to move batches of users to the new server.  Just highlight the users you want to move, right-click and choose Exchange tasks  In the wizard choose move mailbox and select the new Exchange server as the destination.  

Are you putting the Exchange 2003 server in the same domain as the Exchange 5.5 server?  If so, there is no need to ADMT users over as the mailbox accounts will be matched up with the user accounts.

If you are going to put Exchange 2003 in a new domain that complicates matters a bit.  In that case you can either have ADC create the new accounts or you can ADMT the users then configure the ADC.  ADMT will help if you have a fairly complicated environment and don't have time or can't migrate resource to the new domain without re-applying permissions.

More information about ADC/ADMT can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822921
 

What we've done in our lab is added a second, temporary NT4 server to the original domain as a bdc and let it synch, and then promoted it to PDC.  Then upgraded the temporary machine to Server 2003 in-place.  Once that was completed, we added the client's permanent 2003 server to the AD domain, made it a GC, let it synch, then installed Exchange 2003.  (I should point out we used XCOPY to migrate user's home directories and all common files to the new permanent server directly from the original NT server.  We did everything this way because the original NT server is far too corrupted to upgrade and the hardware wont support 2003 Server... not even close)

I'm not sure about using ADMT (I've never used it before and I'm a little confused) because we arent moving from one AD domain to another, we upgraded the user accounts to AD with an in-place upgrade.  Is this assumption correct?

Also, did I install Exchange 2003 correctly?  With the Co-Existance even though we will decommission the 5.5 server?  What else should I do to stabilize Exchange?

You guys have been wonderful.  Thanks for all the helpful tips.  Any more advice? Recommendations?

The co-existance option is correct.  Once you have all the mailboxes moved you will want to follow this article to properly remove the Exchange 5.5 server and switch to native mode.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822450

Another important thing is to download the latest Deployment Tools from Microsoft, there are few improvements in function and bug fixes:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=271e51fd-fe7d-42ad-b621-45f974ed34c0&displaylang=en

I'm reviewing that doc right now.  Thanks for your help.  And the site is great!  Keep up the good work!

You'll be hearing from me more as I get more projects involving Exchagne and I'm telling all my friends about this site.