Hi all, We are going to be deploying Exchange 2007 in our Exchange 2003 organization soon. We are going to be deploying Exchange 2007 using only 2 servers. The specs of the 2 servers are identical as follows: Dual/Quad core processors, whatever the latest speed is with 4 gigs of ram. Our current environment has 250-300 users of which 100 percent of the users are laptop users and all of which have Outlook 2007 and outlook anywhere configured. We currently have 1 FE 2003 server for OWA and Outlook Anywhere and 1 mailbox server. All users use Outlook anywhere all day and night. We have alot of remote users, on the road, etc. What is the recommend/best practice for deployment or are there pros and cons for the following deployment? First Scenario: Server 1 - CAS and Server 2 - Hub Transport and Mailbox OR Second Scenario: Server 1 - CAS and Hub Transport and Server 2 - Mailbox I believe everyone will have their opinions, but support of you opinion or MS docuements with recommendations would be great. Thanks in Advance,

I was in the same scenario that you are in. 2 servers in Exchange 2003 FE/BE going to 2007. All documentation that MS has provided is only good if you have a seperate server for each role. I was not able to buy any new hardware, so I had to use my existing servers to make the migration happen. I removed the FE server from my 2003 org. Outlook Anywhere doesn't work too well in a single server environment, but I did it over a weekend and let everyone know that there would be no access on Saturday. I also exported my SSL cert so I could install on the new CAS. I reinstalled that server with Windows 2003 RC2 64-bit with SP2. I installed Exchange 2007 into my existing organizationwith CAS, Hub and MB roles. I put the SSL cert on this server. At this point, you can re-enable the back-end function on your other Exchange 2003 server. 2007 CAS can act as a front-end box for 2003 back-end servers. I left this up for a few days to make sure things functioned properly. I then ran the public folder replica move. If you don't use pf's, then you can ignore. After this, I started migrating mailboxes over to the 2007 server by using the mailbox move command on the 2007 server. There was no problem with any of the mailbox redirections. There are some other tweaks in the migration in regards to updating address lists and recipient policies that I performed. After everything was migrated, I removed the old back-end server from the organization. I installed Exchange 2007 with only the mailbox role. After getting this installed, I moved everyone's mailboxes and all public folders back to the new MB server. After all of this, I removed the MB role from the 1st server. Everything is working great. There are a couple of times during mailbox moveswhen the mailboxes aren't available but it doesn't last long. All remote access functions are done through E1 and all mail stores are on E2. I couldn't find if this is the best practice but it seemed a good separation from a logical and work-load standpoint. Hope this helps. Rob