In addition to the webcasts I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve learned of some further education resources for getting a leg up on Exchange 2010 (courtesy of the September “MCP Flash” newsletter):
- Learning Snacks – short presentations on Unified Messaging, high availability, and storage
- E-Learning clinics
- Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant – free downloadable preview from Microsoft Press
I’ve just about finished going through the last of the webcasts (finally). Now I have more to dig into.
When will we be moving our environment to Exchange 2010? We still don’t know, but I would like to shoot for Summer of 2010. There are a lot of dependencies, such as storage and server purchases (our CX500 is only supportable for another year, and Exchange 2007 Database Availability Groups will require more storage capacity than our current Single Copy Cluster model), and completion of our new data center (~Summer 2010 maybe, possibly, fingers crossed?). Also, since Exchange 2010 makes Client Access Servers (the front-ends) the endpoints for RPC/MAPI connectivity, we’ll need to figure out a way of implementing high availability and load balancing for this traffic, something which our current load balancing appliances aren’t able to do.
Moving to Exchange 2010 will actually help us shift our Exchange services to the new data center with minimal service interruption, since DAG’s can span different subnets and sites. This is a good thing, as a forklift move of our existing cluster and its accompanying storage infrastructure would involve an outage of several days at the least.
I know that we have users chomping at the bit for Exchange 2010, and so am I. Cross-browser OWA Premium is a nice enticement (especially for our Mac clients), and that is only the tip of the iceberg. But I’ll save enumerating the pros and cons of moving to Ex2010 for another day….