Currenlty have an Exchange 2003 server running on Windows 2000, we have the hardware built for a new Exchange 2003 active/passive cluster running on 2003 Server. We would like tomove the server name and the IP address of the current server to the virtualcluster server.Is it possible? Can I just take the current server offline install Exchange on the cluster serversand the do a restore of the Exchange database? Any other ideas? (My initial thought was to create a temp box move everything over, remove Exchange from old, install Exchange on new, move everything over to new, but when I do the math it would take close to 5 days to complete. Cannot be down that long. The database is roughly 700 users and around 50 GB.)

Hi, Why you need to have same server name and IP Address for the new Exchange Virtual Server as the originally Exchange Server? I would like to explain that if the two requirements are not necessary, we can install the Exchange cluster firstly and move mailbox from the single exchange server to the Exchange Cluster with little downtime. If you have specific requirements which needs to have the same server name and IP Address, please post the cause here and we can work together to locate a workaround. Mike

We use a software package called "Deep Freeze", if you are not familiar it locks down the computer so after every reboot it goes back to the way it was before any changes. We have roughly 3500 computers and we do not have the ability to turn on/off through any management software so to turn it off we need to visit every computer. If we keep the name/IP addressof the server the same then we do not have to visit the computer. If we change the name, Exchange will tell it to go to the new server, it is changed on the client side but on the next reboot that it will be reset back to the old Exchange server nameand once we retire the original mail server then Outlook would not be able to find the mailbox. Thanks