I'm in the process of adding a dedicated Exchange 2003 server to my SBS 2003 Premium network.  The load on my SBS box is simply too much, so I've purchased a new Dell PE1950 with 2 Quadcore Xeons and 4Gb of RAM.  I have purchased the necessary Exchange and Windows server CALs.  I just need to know if someone has prepared some documentation on how to perform this task.  If possible, I'd like to run both Exchange servers for a while (1 week) while I transition my mailboxes based on my users and terminal servers. 

 

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Ken

Thanks for your reply and input, Kevin.

 

Tell me, should I keep the existing SBS Exchange running to publish OWA as a front-end Exchange server after I move the mailboxes/public folders or should I completely remove Exchange from SBS?  I know my SBS wizards for new users will stop working, but that's no big deal.  Truthfully, I'm trying to get some perfomance back on SBS by this move.

 

And my new dedicated Exchange server is on a Dell PE 1950 running Windows 2003 R2 X64 server.  I will be using the 32-bit version of Exchange 2003 Standard, however.  My SBS is not R2.  Because the new Exchange server will simply be a member server and not a DC, I'm guessing that it will not be necessary to extend the schema to reflect R2.

 

Thanks again.

 

Ken

Hi Ken,

 

I am wondering what hardware is used on the SBS that you are having performance problems? How much RAM do you have and what third party applications are installed on it?

It's an older Dell PE 2600 with 4Gb of RAM and twin Xeon 2.2GHz CPUs.  The RAID1 and RAID5 drives are 15k SCSIs.  We have about 70 very active mailboxes and a rather large Public Folder store.  Truthfully, it's time to Swing to another SBS box, but the company is growing so very rapidly that it's hard to keep pace.  We've alreay purchased the necessary Transition Packs and CALs, so it's just a few months before it's somewhat out of the picture, anyway.  The client is perfect for the new EBS by Microsoft, but our time frame is now.  And it's been my experience that Microsoft almost never releases on time.  I do already have a dedicated SQL 2005 server as a member server to SBS.

 

Ken