[sc:software-category ]Exchange 2013 came out late last year and I haven’t had a chance to install it until recently.
I have to admit I just kind of jump feet first in to the upgrade, spun up a Windows Server 2012 VM, assigned some RAM and Disk space and mounted the cd image.
The setup is pretty straight forward from there, a few pre-requisites that you have to manually install (the UC runtime and the Filter Pack) but other than that the setup program does the rest.
Once installed Microsoft has continued down its “Don’t provide GUI tools” path and there is basically no GUI for Exchange Server management. Instead everything is done through the web UI, which isn’t as robust as the old Windows GUI was.
After poking around a bit I decided to move an admin account from 2010 to 2013, the migration process was straight forward and I logged in to OWA for the admin account. The first thing I noticed was the fact that it was still the 2010 OWA interface. After poking around a bit I found a setting that indicated which version to use, but it was read only and I could not alter it.
Doing some research on the net turned up a couple of interesting things:
- The Exchange 2013 documentation is well… let’s call it thin. Many of the pages are simply blank and others don’t contain nearly enough information yet.
- The Exchange Server Deployment Assistant has only just been released and only support new installs, no upgrades so it’s not much help really.
- Exchange 2013 co-existence with 2007 and 2010 is not yet supported, Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) which is supposed to be released by end of Q1 will bring this support.
And that’s when I stepped back and released I was in quick sand. The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any issue with leaving 2013 in place at the moment. 2010 is running along just fine and mail is flowing to the admin mailbox I moved over as well.
It does kind of make me wonder why Microsoft released 2013 so early when it’s clearly not yet ready for the majority of deployments, but presumably there was pressure to get it out to support new clients moving from other platforms and to support their hosted hybrid implementations.
CU1 was released last week and I’ve done the install but the lack of documentation for co-existence is a real problem, I’ll post part 2 of the upgrade once the deployment assistant is updated (unless I get adventurous again and just give it a go again ;).
