Essential Business Server – pt1

This will be the first part of (hopefully) a series on EBS2008. And as all projects, it starts with the preparation and planning phases.

EBS 2008 comes with two wizards, that must be downloaded from the Microsoft website. To install them, you need the standalone installlation of the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer, also available from the Microsoft website. If you have the Exchange 2007 Management Console installed, it will not work.

The first wizard is the preparation wizard. It starts of with a timeline and then wants to download some updates.

After it is updated, it wants to know if you plan on creating a new domain or join an existing one.

Then is wants to know your network’s gateway address. From that, it will derive your networkaddress.

On the next screen, you can add additional subnets to scan if you have any.

Next you can start the scan. It will run a comprehensive test on your network to check for problems that might prohibit a succesfull migration to EBS 2008. Depending on your answert to the domain question, these tests include AD issues such as replication, time synchronization, network bindings and DNS issues. And thanks to the Exchange BPA you also get info on Exchange like the installed Servicepacks, the operational mode (mixed/native) and the infamous link state suppression registrykey.

Once the scan is done you get a screen with the results. If you have any errors, you can not click Finish, only cancel. Luckily Microsoft provides links to articles on how to correct any problems.

Once you have corrected the problems, you can run the scan again to check your work. If your satisfied with the results and have no more errors, you get the timeline again, pointing you to the next step.

The planning wizard will be covered in the next part.

Please note that, because you can download the wizards, you can use them even if you’re not planning on migrating to EBS2008. I used them at home to check the general health of my own network. Turns out I had some minor issues which we’re easily corrected. One test that was obviously missing was the backup test for Exchange. As a true IT Pro, i never make backups at home of course, but the Exchange check found no issues with that. I would strongly recommend taking backups before making any changes to your environment, never mind a full-blown migration.