To me everything looks straight forward. Upgrade the AD schema by running Setup.com /ps command Once its done you are ready to install Exchange 2010. As Toni said, its a good practice to have backup of your AD before updating the schema. But I never came across that you have to revert back you AD, except once when client installed 2010 without knowing that it's 2010 not 2007. (LOL) Note: These are the commands you should run before installing the exchange server Setup.com /ps Setup.com /preparead Setup.com /Preparedomain I would suggest to have one Domain controller cause in case something happens to one DC another one is there to take care of your domain. Cheers, Gulab | MCITP: Exchange 2010-2007 | Lync Server 2010 | Windows Server 2008 | Skype: Exchange.Ranger | Blog: www.ExchangeRanger.Blogspot.com

Hello, yes, Exchange modifies the AD schema. You should take a backup of your AD before you start the installation so you can roll back when anything goes wrong. For the requirements for Exchange please refer to this site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx Greetings, Toni

What OS is your domain controller running? In any case, yes, you want to perform a system state backup - just in case. Note: Setup.com /PrepareAD If there is only one domain, then this command will prepare the domain as well as Active Directory, so it's not necessary to run /PrepareDomain afterwards. Disk configuration 2x 500GB SAS 6Gbps HDDs (RAID1, for O/S), 3x 2TB SAS 6Gbps HDDs (RAID5, for Exchange storage) E2K10 has improved the IOPS performance by something like 70% compared to E2K7 so you should probably be able to store both database and log files on the same RAID array. Especially with only 10 users and even a maximum of 100. Of course, type of mail use comes into play as well: how many messages sent/received per day? What is the average size? What about attachments? Anything out of the ordinary here? But unless you're doing something exceptional, that hardware should be enough for 10 users, and even more. Schema update From what I have seen, and learned from others, schema updates usually go very well.

To me everything looks straight forward. Upgrade the AD schema by running Setup.com /ps command Once its done you are ready to install Exchange 2010. As Toni said, its a good practice to have backup of your AD before updating the schema. But I never came across that you have to revert back you AD, except once when client installed 2010 without knowing that it's 2010 not 2007. (LOL) Note: These are the commands you should run before installing the exchange server Setup.com /ps Setup.com /preparead Setup.com /Preparedomain I would suggest to have one Domain controller cause in case something happens to one DC another one is there to take care of your domain. Cheers, Gulab | MCITP: Exchange 2010-2007 | Lync Server 2010 | Windows Server 2008 | Skype: Exchange.Ranger | Blog: www.ExchangeRanger.Blogspot.com

Hi, The DC is on Windows Server 2003. :)

Hi, I'm completely new to Exchange (a fact that will probably become very clear) and I'm after a bit of advice regarding the spec of the new Exchange server. My company has 10 staff at present, and we would like a bit of headroom on our server to enable us to support at least 100 Exchange users. Being a small company, I would expect a single server should be all we need for the forseeable future. The basic hardware spec that I put together is this: Dell PowerEdge R510 - 2x Intel Xeon E5620, 4C, 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, 2x 500GB SAS 6Gbps HDDs (RAID1, for O/S), 3x 2TB SAS 6Gbps HDDs (RAID5, for Exchange storage), Windows Server 2008 Std x64. Dell have advised me that this hardware shpuld support my requirements OK. I'd appreciate any second (third, etc) opinions. I have an existing domain controller that runs our internal AD. I believe that the Exchange install makes certain changes to the domain settings... Is this anything that should worry me? (We currently don't have a secondary/backup domain controller.) Would anyone care to offer any advice or gotchas to be aware of before I go any further? Many thanks!

Hello, yes, Exchange modifies the AD schema. You should take a backup of your AD before you start the installation so you can roll back when anything goes wrong. For the requirements for Exchange please refer to this site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx Greetings, Toni

Exchange server 2010 requires Windows 2008 64bit edition. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx Operating systemMicrosoft Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard and Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition. Also refre this article for before installing Exchange 2010 http://www.petenetlive.com/KB/Article/0000416.htm Viral Rathod Blog : http://viralr.wordpress.com

Exchange server 2010 requires Windows 2008 64bit edition. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx Operating systemMicrosoft Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard and Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition. Also refre this article for before installing Exchange 2010 http://www.petenetlive.com/KB/Article/0000416.htm Viral Rathod Blog : http://viralr.wordpress.com