MSExchangeGuru.com

The most important and desirable thing to know is the prerequisite of any new product. Exchange 2013 is a design change after exchange 2007 and 2010 so the prerequisite changes as well.

Let take a look at the new Exchange 2013 pre-requisite cheat sheet!!!

• Exchange 2003 and earlier versions are not supported
  
• Exchange Server 2010 SP3*
  
• Exchange Server 2007 SP3 (+ coexistence RU*)
  
• *This is the update rollup specially for 2013
  
• No coexistence is support in Preview.

Supported client access methods

• Outlook 2013, Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007
  
• RPC over HTTP is only method of connectivity for Outlook clients
  
• Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition
  
• Outlook for Mac 2011
  
• Outlook clients earlier than Outlook 2007 are not supported.
  
• Email clients on Mac operating systems that require DAV, such as Entourage 2008 for Mac RTM and Entourage 2004, are not supported.

• Windows Server 2003 forest functional level or higher
  
• At least one Windows 2003 SP2 or later GC/DC in each site
  
• No support for RODC or ROGC

Supported Namespaces

• Contiguous
  
• Disjoint
  
• Single label domain
  
• Non-contiguous

• Exchange Server – Mailbox or Client Access
  
• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard or Enterprise
  
  • Standard – for Exchange 2013 Client Access servers
    
  • Enterprise – for Exchange 2013 Mailbox servers in a DAG
    
• Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter – Clustering is part of both.
  
• Management workstation
  
• Windows Server 2012
  
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP1
  
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with SP1
  
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter RTM or later
  
• 64-bit edition of Windows 8 Release Preview
  
• 64-bit edition of Windows 7 with SP1
  

• .NET Framework 4.5
  
• Windows Management Framework 3.0
  
• Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) 4.0
  
• Desktop Experience
  
• RSAT
  
• IIS – will talk about the components in the next article on Exchange 2013 installation.
  

• IPv6 Support
  
  • IPv6 is supported only when IPv4 is also used; a pure IPv6 environment isn’t supported. Using IPv6 addresses and IP address ranges is supported only when both IPv6 and IPv4 are enabled on that computer, and the network supports both IP address versions. If Exchange 2013 Preview is deployed in this configuration, all server roles can send data to and receive data from devices, servers, and clients that use IPv6 addresses. Exchange 2013 Preview support is similar to support for Exchange Server 2007.

 

Certificates

We need a 3rd part SAN certificate with minimum 2 SAN in it 1 for autodiscover.domain.com and other for mail.domain.com

mail.domain.com will be the url for all urls in Exchange

 

Installing Exchange 2013 on directory servers

Hardware

Processor:

x64 architecture-based computer with Intel processor that supports Intel 64 architecture (formerly known as Intel EM64T)

AMD processor that supports the AMD64 platform

Intel Itanium IA64 processors not supported

Memory:

It is working well on my 8GB memory VM with no user. I would recommend minimum 16 GB on a mailbox+CA server. This may vary for number of mailbox and light/medium/heavy profile.

Disk Space:

At least 1.2 GB on the drive on which you install Exchange

An additional 500 MB of available disk space for each Unified Messaging (UM) language pack that you plan to install

200 MB of available disk space on the system drive

A hard disk that stores the message queue database on an Edge Transport server or Hub Transport server with at least 500 MB of free space

The above are the basic requirements of the exchange but we also need 2 GB temp file for exchange files extraction.

2GB to copy the exchange 2013 Preview ISO file.

I would recommend minimum 50GB for both C: drive and for exchange D: drive.

DB, Logs and transport queue disk space will be as per the organizational requirement.

Virtualization

All Exchange 2013 Preview server roles are supported within a virtual machine, provided the virtual machine and hypervisor environment meet all of the system requirements for running Exchange 2013 Preview.

Microsoft supports Exchange 2013 Preview in production on hardware virtualization software only when all the following conditions are true:

The hardware virtualization software is running one of the following:

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

The Exchange guest virtual machine:

Is running Microsoft Exchange 2013 Preview.

Is deployed on an operating system that is supported by Exchange 2013 Preview.

The storage used by an Exchange virtual machine for Exchange data (for example, mailbox databases or Hub transport queues) can be any of the following:

Virtual disks of a fixed size.

Virtual disks store on block-level, direct attached storage (DAS) that is locally connected to the hypervisor machine.

Block-level storage that is connected via storage area network (SAN) technology (could include fiber channel, fiber channel over Ethernet, or Internet SCSI (iSCSI)).

SCSI pass-through storage.

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage.

All storage used by an Exchange guest machine for storage of Exchange data must be block-level storage because Exchange 2013 Preview doesn’t support the use of network attached storage (NAS) volumes. Also, NAS storage that’s presented to the guest as block-level storage via the hypervisor isn’t supported.

The following virtual disk requirements apply for volumes used to store Exchange data:

Virtual disks that dynamically expand aren’t supported by Exchange.

Virtual disks that use differencing or delta mechanisms (such as Hyper-V’s differencing VHDs or snapshots) aren’t supported.

The following features and technologies are not supported for virtualized Exchange environment:

Oversubscription or dynamic adjustment of memory allocated to Exchange 2013 Preview virtual machines.

Virtual machine snapshots which capture the state of a running virtual machine and allow reverting to a previous state.

Prabhat Nigam (Wizkid)
Team@MSExchangeGuru

 

Posted October 22nd, 2012 under Exchange 2013. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.