Unity server swap with OS change?

[sposte]

This is Unity 4.2 VM onbox. The customer is upgrading hardware from a 7815i to a 7835i server. They are currently running win2000 and exch2000. Cisco is now shipping win2003 and exch2003 for VM onbox configurations.

Question: Will there be any issues doing a DiRT backup over the LAN to the new box and then DiRT restore (including messages)? The new box will be running Exch2003. We have about 500 users, message store size about 1 gig.

[Tommer Catlin]

In DiRT, everything has to be same (technically) You can probably get away with doing the follow:

Backup First!

Do an inplace upgrade of Exchange 2000 to 2003 on the old server.

Install new server will OS,4.2 and all patches, same SQL version and patches.

Run DIRT on the old server

Run DIRT on the new server and import.

Should go in fine. You could try it without the Exchange inplace upgrade. Esentially, all the DiRT is doing is making a PST file of all the mailboxes in Exchange and then importing the PST into the recovered or new server.

CHeck out http://www.ciscounitytools.com/App_DisasterRecoveryTools.htm

Good videos on the step by step and details of DiRT.

Enjoy!

[sposte]

Thanks,

I checked out Jeff's DiRT videos. The utility is independant of Exch and OS version, and should work as long as the Unity version matches.

Scott