Hi all, In our dev. envir, we have exchange 2003 front-end and backend servers. A year agao, we introduced two exchange 2007 SP2 servers (one is CAS/HUB and another one is Mailbox server). we switched OAB etc. Two months ago, the disk that holds these two exchange 2007 VMs were dead. data are not recovered. Now, we decided that we are going to upgrade to exchange 2010. So, I am going to test to introduce exchange 2010 into this dev. envir.. Is there a way to remove exchange 2007 installation? or I can just introduce exchange 2010 without removing exchange 2007? Thank you.

The only supported way to remove Exchange 2007 is via add/remove programs. Therefore your best course of action is to build replacement (virtual) machines for those two servers, then do a recoverserver installation from the command line. You will need to use the same version of Exchange 2007 - so SP2 - you cannot use SP3 because the domain hasn't been prep-ed for that version. . Once the recover server installation is complete you have two options. 1. Install Exchange 2007 SP3, then Exchange 2010. You can't install Exchange 2010 with Exchange 2007 SP2 in place. 2. Remove Exchange 2007 using add/remove programs and then install Exchange 2010. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

The only supported option to gracefully remove Exchange is by reinstalling a new instance of your 2007 servers using the recoverserver switch and then uninstalling them. Yes it's overkill since this is dev. If you do not want to go down this route then your only option is to remove the 2007 server instances using adsiedit. When you do this, it's not a gracefull removal as backlinks referencing the servers will still exist in AD configuration partition. Will it cause an issue if you introduce 2010 probably not, even if it does I'm sure you can get around out. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com