Implement archiving first. Shrink down all the mailboxes. Trying to migrate a 450 GB mailbox is... well a pain.
Once you get that done, then look at planning out your migration to Exchange 2010. One server on this side of the pond, one on the other. This will help out with your PF's, if you're going to keep all of them. Unless you want to lower the latency of the network, or up the bandwidth, having a "local" server will improve access performance for the users. John M. -----Original Message----- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:kurt.b...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:03 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Exchange upgrade considerations for my environment - how would you proceed? Sitrep: HQ in Redmond and two overseas offices, each running Exchange 2003. HQ is doing message journaling for all sites. MJ mailbox (containing all mail from approximately June 2009, with no clear corporate policy on mail retention, so we keep it all) is approaching 450gb in a separate database - all mailboxes in HQ are in a single DB that's approaching 400gb. PFs (several thousand!) and some are replicated across all servers, while others are only replicated from overseas offices to the US - size in the US office of about 40gb . HQ has 2x2008R2 DCs, and the DFL/FFL is at 2003 native. No archiving solution in place (we tried the Metalogix one shortly after Sunbelt took it over, along with the file archiving solution, and it was less than satisfactory, probably due to implementation errors, but it left a bad taste, nonetheless) Exchange servers in all offices are 6 years old Current IT manager wants to consolidate all Exchange servers into a single server in the US at some point, but bandwidth and latency are not great, especially for the UK office. Which would you do first? o- Implement an archiving solution for the HQ? (manager is currently touting the Barracuda solution, though he's not played with it, and nor have I) o- Upgrade to Exchange 2010 and not worry about server consolidation until later, and use the native archiving (I'm not up on this either) o- Upgrade to Exchange 2010 and consolidate servers and use native archiving o- Something else? Kurt --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist
