In this article series we will explain and go through all the steps to migrate from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013.

The series consists of four Parts:

Before You Begin

Exchange is always considered as a mission critical service; accordingly and to assure a smooth upgrade process without any interruption to mail services, you have to spend some time on planning your deployment and upgrade. A good start can be through the below links:

Exchange 2013 TechEd Sessions and Labs which includes session about Exchange 2013 high availability, virtualization, managed availability, retention, site mailboxes, modern public folders, transport, unified messaging, Outlook Web App, EWS, and the most important one in case you will be doing a migration is Exchange Server 2013 On-Premises Upgrade and Coexistence

Sizing Exchange 2013 Deployments by the Exchange Team Blog

Exchange Server 2013 Deployment Assistant

Introduction

In my Lab I have Exchange 2007 server holding CAS/HUB/MBX roles with a few users on it, published to the internet using TMG (with no pre-authentication), TMG acting as my SMTP GW as well, our goal in these series of posts to deploy a single Exchange 2013 server with all server roles on it, migrate all users and services to the new server, and finally decommission our legacy server.

Checklist

Exchange 2013 Deployment
Digital Certificates Configurations
Configure Exchange-related virtual directories
Configure offline address book (OAB)
Move Internet mail flow from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013
Move Client Access from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013
Move mailboxes from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013
Move public folder data from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2013
Decommissioning Exchange 2007

1.Exchange 2013 Deployment

AD Preparation

From a domain joined machine in the same AD domain, & Site of your Schema master (in my case I have single forest single domain and single AD site); with Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 and Windows Management Framework 3.0 installed, open PowerShell and run the following commands:

Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-ADDS

.setup /PrepareAD /OrganizationName: contoso /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms

To Validate your AD preparation open your Schema partition using ADSI and make sure that ms-Exch-Schema-Version-Pt is showing the correct value as shown below:

Open you Active Directory Users and Computers console, you should be able to see the below groups created:

For more validation steps, and information about AD preparation requirements visit this link.

Force AD replication and make sure its successful, then let us move to the next steps.

Exchange 2013 Installation

OS prerequisites Installation:

To Install OS prerequisites on Windows Server 2012 open PowerShell and run the following command:

Install-WindowsFeature AS-HTTP-Activation, Desktop-Experience, NET-Framework-45-Features, RPC-over-HTTP-proxy, RSAT-Clustering, RSAT-Clustering-CmdInterface, RSAT-Clustering-Mgmt, RSAT-Clustering-PowerShell, Web-Mgmt-Console, WAS-Process-Model, Web-Asp-Net45, Web-Basic-Auth, Web-Client-Auth, Web-Digest-Auth, Web-Dir-Browsing, Web-Dyn-Compression, Web-Http-Errors, Web-Http-Logging, Web-Http-Redirect, Web-Http-Tracing, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-ISAPI-Filter, Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console, Web-Metabase, Web-Mgmt-Console, Web-Mgmt-Service, Web-Net-Ext45, Web-Request-Monitor, Web-Server, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Static-Content, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-WMI, Windows-Identity-Foundation

After restart install the below components in the same order:

In case you have a different scenario (such as separate MBX & CAS roles) follow the steps in this link.

MBX/CAS Server Installation:

To install MBX/CAS server (in my case I will change the first DB name and directory; this is optional) open PowerShell and run the following command:

.setup /m:Install /Roles:ca,mb,mt /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /InstallWindowsComponents /DBFilePath:"C:DB01DB01.edb" /LogFolderPath:"C:DB01Logs" /MdbName:"DB01"