Hello all,
I have a customer that is running SBS 2003. They want to move to a newer version of Exchange because they are growing beyond 2003's limitations and they also want to take advantage of the newer features available, but we still need to keep their SBS 2003 server
around for AD and file sharing.
I have a couple of questions I'm hoping somebody can answer to to let me know what will and will not work together. Here are a couple of scenarios we are looking at:
Keep the existing SBS 2003 server for AD and file sharing. Migrate Exchange database to new 2008 r2 server with Exchange 2010, then remove Exchange from SBS 2003 server. Is this possible, and are there potential problems?
Scenario 2: (I understand that it is not possible to go directly from Exchange 2003 to 2012)
We would keep the existing SBS 2003 server for AD and file sharing. Migrate Exchange database to temporary 2008 r2 server with Exchange 2010, remove Exchange from SBS 2003 server, then migrate data from Exchange 2010 to new (and final) 2012 server with Exchange 2013. Would this work, and any potential problems? I am not sure if Exchange 2013 will run at all with SBS 2003.
Basically I just want to double check which versions of Exchange will work with the existing SBS 2003. If anybody knows of any potential problems with keeping SBS 2003 holding all of the roles and running Exchange on a separate server, please let me know. In
the next year or so, we will eventually retire the SBS 2003 server with just a stand alone server.
Thank you all in advance.
Jim