Saturday 10 January 2009

Exchange 2003 to 2007 Migration (Exmerge)

Just some little handy tips to share around in regards to migrating users from a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server to the all new singing and dancing Exchange 2007.

As most of you will probably know just from looking at the new Exchange management console it isnt quite as easy as copying and pasting the priv1.edb or Exmerging in and Exmerging out the old data.

The techniques are now slightly different:

Although the method is the same there is a slight change if you are doing this for a Server 2003 with Exchange 2007 or an SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007. If you are runnning SBS 2008 then you must download the Exchange Management Tools and the Windows Powershell add-on from the Microsoft site and run this on a 32-Bit machine seperate to the SBS box. (Please note that if you are doing import mailbox procedures then you need to download Exchange 2007 SP1 from the site)

So first step then is the data extraction; from 2003 this is very basic and straight forward using Exmerge from Microsoft you can take out all of the previous mailboxes into PST's and store them on the new server.

The second step is to go into the Exchange management shell and enter the following commands bearing in mind that all scripts are case sensitive.

Grant the Administrator Account full access to all Mailbox's:
"Get-Mailbox | Add-MailboxPermission –user Username –AccessRight FullAccess –Inheritancetype all"

Begin the import procedure for all users
"Get-Mailbox -Database “SERVER\Mailbox Database” | Import-Mailbox -PSTFolderPath "

This will then go through the motions for importing all of the pst files into their correct user accounts.

If you want to look at importing an individual mailbox to an individual user then the process is again very similar but the command is as follows:
"Import-Mailbox -Identity -PSTFolderPath "




TIP:
Typing -whatif at the end of a command in Exchange powershell runs a simulation of the command without actually doing anything with the data.



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2 comments:

  1. Going to try this over the weekend for a failed SBS 2003 box where the AD, Exchange and users aren't seeing eye to eye so new 2008 server is going in. Hopefully no dramas.
    Might be worth adding the Exchange 2007 is up to SP3 now, and installing that plus the rollup patches will take about an hour to start with, even on a punchy server.

    Thanks for the info though, very useful

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Kris, mail migration went really well, used the import mailbox option as there were some big differences between the mailbox users and the old mailboxes.
    Had to use the UNC to find the mailboxes to import, so I created a share on the additional storage used e.g \\servername\sharename then it went through brilliantly. For the users that AD couldn't figure out which pst to use, I just added the "file.pst" to the end of it.

    Thanks again, most helpful

    ReplyDelete

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