Later this year, we’ll be migrating Microsoft Exchange 2003 over to 2007. Apparently, this isn’t technically a migration but is instead a transition. Something to do with moving and upgrading the same product, rather than changing from another product (like Lotus Notes or something, presumably). Semantics, eh? Tch.
This task is one fraught with peril at every turn, so requires a bit of planning and testing. The first issue is that Exchange 2007 only runs on a 64-bit version of Windows Server. Naturally, we only have 32-bit 2003. So we need to upgrade the server from Windows 2003 (32-bit) to Windows 2008 (64-bit), and there’s no upgrade path. We need to build a new server, but we don’t have the hardware and the current Exchange server is easily up to the task anyway, so after the transition it would be redundant.
Virtualisation to the rescue!
The intention, then, is to virtualise the current Exchange Server, plonk the virtual machine temporarily on another server, then wipe the original to put Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007 on. After that, there’s the task of actually doing the transition.
Today I started on a trial run of the process. I’ve already got a running 2008 server with Exchange 2007 on it ready, and I’ve found a way of making a virtual machine out of a running server: disk2vhd. Once you run it (and you don’t need to take your machine down to do so), you get this:
Then we wait. For a very, very long time. A day, in fact.
After that, it should be as simple as plugging the new VHD into something like Virtual PC or Virtual Box. But it seems that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t taken account of the fact that the machine with Virtual Box installed on it was a single Quad Core processor, and the Exchange Server was running on a Dual Quad Core processor. So it wouldn’t boot, as it didn’t have enough CPUs.
Looks like I’m going to have to put it all on hold for a bit then, until I get some more hardware, or find a way of reducing the CPUs 🙂
What about VMWare, there’s a couple of free flavours of it, and I seem to recall it’s not as fussy about CPUs
It’s more that the image I’ve made expects 8 cores on boot, and if it doesn’t have 8 cores, it crashes. I can’t imagine VMWare will be any different – although I’ll give it a try.