Vat of Knowledge

Had to finally step it up and get familiar with what has been in use since 2006.  Wow, late bloomer eh?  My company would not step up with 64 bit hardware, but that’s still no excuse.  Any 64 bit machine with a copy of VMWare will do nicely.

I’m running VMWare ESXi 4, the free version.  I started by building out a Windows Server 2008 NON-R2 Enterprise server, updating it, sysprepping it, and copying it.  Exchange 2007 can deploy on R2, but it’s such a pain, just use NON-R2, trust me, you’ll be glad you did.  Save R2 for Exchange 2010.

Sysprep

Included in Windows 2008 is sysprep.  You will find it at:

c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep

Run this and choose OOBE and make sure to put a check in the box for “generalize”.  Generalize will generate a new machine SID on next boot.

Copy the VM’s

In ESXi, highlight the VMWare server and choose the configuration tab.  Click on Storage.  Right click your datastore, default is datastore1, and click “browse datastore”.  Find the folder for the machine you have sysprepped and highlight the .vmx file and the .vmdk file, right click and copy.  Create a new folder under the root folder and right click paste.  When done, right click the .vmx file and add to inventory.

Configure a DC

First VM should be your domain controller so bring it up, and give it a good name, like SERVER or DC1.  Promote to a DC and build active directory using dcpromo.

Deploy Exchange

For this, I followed the following article:

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/deploying-exchange-2007-sp1-ccr-cluster-windows-server-2008-failover-cluster-part1.html

Works like a charm!!!

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