Deploying Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (Part 5)

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

Introduction

So far, we have introduced the roles and the planning process for the implementation of our main UC products. In the last couple of articles we created the basic services required for UC practice. Now it is time to start building our UC environment. The first piece of the puzzle to tackle is the messaging portion, namely, our well-known Exchange Server. An Exchange Server 2007 article explaining the installation process can already be found here on MSExchange.org alongside a bunch of tips and tricks to perform this process in our Forums and Blogs. In this article I will touch on this subject again but I will also add some of my own tricks and tips, such as disabling IPv6, installing the pre-requisites through XML files on Windows Server 2008 and also automatically update to the latest Rollup Update during the installation process.

Before starting the process, a couple of key points should be validated:

  • Make sure that DNS Servers are configured properly and pointing out to the Domain Controller that we installed on the previous article
  • Exchange server is a member of the domain that we created in the previous articles of this series.
  • Make sure that the operating system is up to date
  • Make sure that Windows Firewall is turned on before starting the installation process

Disabling IPV6

Exchange Server 2007 has IPv6 support, however, is not a requirement and we are not going to use it in our current environment so what we are going to do is to disable it. Before we can do this, do not go to the network adapter and uncheck the IPv6 component and think that is enough. The best way to disable IPv6 is by disabling it in the Windows Registry. Some Microsoft KBs, now they are called Microsoft Fix and basically they allow an administrator to download and run a small utility that will carry out the configuration required and described in that MS KB. IPv6 has a Microsoft Fix KB available and it can be found here.

The Microsoft Fix is a pretty straight forward procedure. Just open the file that you have just downloaded and accept the contract agreement and click on Next, and the click Finish (Figure 1). After that, a dialog box will pop up asking for a server restart and because we are not playing in product click on Yes to restart the server. After the restart, run an IPConfig /all command in the command-prompt and you will see that the IPV6 information doesn’t show up anymore.


Figure 1

Preparing the Source Installation Files

It is now time to prepare the Exchange Server 2007 installation. First of all, let us download Exchange Server from Microsoft or copy the content of an Exchange Server 2007 media that you may have to the C:\Ex2k7 folder. Why not install directly from the media? Well, we want to upgrade the Exchange Server 2007 to the latest Rollup Update (RU) during the installation. Exchange Server 2007 has Rollup Updates between Service Pack releases and they are incremental and they start from 1 after each Service Pack release, we can see a picture of the relation between service packs and Rollup Update on Figure 2.  Microsoft has a KB article with all the information you will need about RU and Service Packs on Exchange Server 2007. The KB is also the best place to find the latest updates for the product, the KB can be found here.

Note:
Like any other Service Pack, the latest rollup Update has all updates from previous RU versions which means if you install RU 5 for Service Pack 1 all other previous 4 RU released before RU 5 will be included.


Figure 2

Well, at the time of writing this article, the most recent update is Service Pack 1. Therefore, we are going to download Exchange Server 200 SP1 and we are going to check the KB article mentioned earlier to find out how to download the latest Rollup Update for the current service pack. We are also going to download the content to the subfolder Updates of the Exchange Server installation source, as shown in Figure 3. Any update on that folder will be automatically executed after the product installation.


Figure 3

Installing the Pre-requisites

Okay, so far, we download the Exchange Server’s latest release version and also the latest Rollup Update. Now it is time to prepare the Operating System to support Exchange Server 2007. As we saw in our first article, the environment will have a single Exchange Server 2007 box containing the 3 main roles (Mailbox, Client Access Server and Hub Transport). We can go to the Server Manager and start installing from there the required roles, however, there is a better or simpler way to do that, we are going to the following MSExchangeTeam site and download a set of XML files that contain all OS requirements by Exchange Server role. These files can be used with the ServerManagerCMD utility of Windows Server 2008. After extracting the content of the zip file we are going to be presented with the following files, as shown in Figure 4.


Figure 4

The names of the files are self-explanatory, so let us use them to install all prerequisites for Exchange Server 2007. First, let us install the Base which contains the basic requirements for any role. If you receive a prompt that a restart is required after running ServerManagerCMD please do it and continue after restarting the server. These are the following XML files that will be used in our current environment. You can run these following commands from server command-prompt:

  1. ServerManagerCMD –ip Exchange-Base.xml
  2. ServerManagerCMD –ip Exchange-CAS.xml
  3. ServerManagerCMD –ip Exchange-MBX.xml

Installation Process

The installation process is pretty straight forward and we should not have any issues because we have worked on all pre-requisites. You can use these following steps to install the first Exchange Server 2007 and because that is the first one the Organization will be created during this process as well.

  1. Log on to the server.
  2. Open the folder Ex2k7 and double click on Setup.exe
  3. On Exchange Server Setup splash screen, click on Step 4: Install Exchange Server 2007 SP1.
  4. On Introduction page. Click on Next.
  5. On License agreement page. Read the contract and click on I Accept the terms in the license agreement and click Next.
  6. On Error Reporting page. You have the option to choose if you want to send error reports automatically to Microsoft. Click Next.
  7. On Installation type page. Click on Custom Exchange Server Installation and click Next.
    Note:
    In this scenario we could click on Typical however Custom which shows us all the roles and you should get used to their names and functions.
  8. On Server Role Selection page. Select the main roles as shown in figure 05 and click on Next.

 


Figure 5

  1. On Exchange Organization page. Fill out with your organization name and click Next.
  2. On Client Settings page. In our article we are a happy company and all clients will be using Outlook 2007/2010 and because of that we can say No and click Next.
    Note:
    If you have any Outlook 2003 or Entourage in your environment you need to select Yes.
  3. On Readiness Checks page. Validate if all components passed and click on Install.  (Figure 06)


Figure 6

  1. On the Completion page. You will receive the status of the installation process, and if all components are green you had a successful installation process. Click on Finish. (Figure 7)


Figure 7

Do you remember the Updates folder from the beginning of our article? Time to see if it worked out. Let us check the Program Features under Control Panel and we can see the Update Rollup 9 has been installed during the Setup process, as shown in Figure 8.


Figure 8

During the installation process the Setup also changed the firewall rules of the Windows Firewall component, we can open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security under Administrative Tools and we will see all the Inbound Rules created by the setup process, as shown in Figure 9.


Figure 9

Defining STMP Address

After installing Exchange Server 2007, one of the first things that we need to change in order to continue with our deployment is to create and apply our new domain name space for SMTP addresses. The internal clients joined to our domain will have single sign-on to access all applications, such as Exchange and OCS and we want also to use a single SMTP address between applications. In our scenario we are going to configure the SMTP domain and later on we are going to configure OCS to use the same domain. On Exchange Server 2007 side we can follow these simple steps:

  1. Open Exchange Server Management Console.
  2. Expand Organization Configuration.
  3. Click on Mailbox.
  4. Click on Accepted Domain tab.
  5. Click on New Accepted Domain link located on the Toolbox Actions.
  6. On New Accepted Domain page. Type in a Name and in the Accepted Domain field type in your domain name. (In our article series is AndersonPatricio.org) and select the option Authoritative Domain and click on New (figure 10) and Finish.


Figure 10

  1. Now, click on E-mail Address Policies tab.
  2. Right click on Default Policy and click on Edit.
  3. On Introduction page. Just click Next.
  4. On Conditions page. Click Next.
  5. On E-mail Addresses page. Click on Add button and on the SMTP E-mail Address window. Let’s configure the format of e-mail address to be FirstName.LastName and also select the domain that we have just created which is our external SMTP address (in our article series andersonpatricio.org), and then click OK. (Figure 11)


Figure 11

  1. On E-mail Addresses page. Set the new E-mail Address entry that we have just created as default clicking on Set as Reply, and afterwards remove the Active Directory FQDN address from the list. The final result is going to be a single line, as shown in Figure 12.


Figure 12

  1. On Schedule page. Leave default settings and click Next.
  2. On Edit E-mail Address Policy page. Click on Edit.
  3. The result is going to be any existent user will receive @andersonpatricio.org as default SMTP address and it also applies to any new mailbox after this change.

This procedure will fit perfectly with OCS down the road because all users will have a unique identity to send messages and log on communicator.

Next Step

Exchange Server 2007 requires a lot of extra steps in order to be functional and all of them must be covered during your planning and design process. For the purpose of this article series we just make sure that the Exchange Server 2007 and the SMTP address are being configured, however you can check some of the steps that you may need in order to finish Exchange Server 2007 installation, as follows:

Besides of those articles, there are some items that you should go over before putting an Exchange Server 2007 in production, such as: Antivirus, Backup, Certificates, Anti-spam, Web services, Mailbox maintenance and etc.

Conclusion

In this article we went through the Exchange Serve r2007 installation process. We have not configured the entire Exchange Server, we just configure the minimum requirements to build our proposed environment which is using a single SMTP address for all users and the same domain will be used as SIP domain of our OCS environment.

 

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

 

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