This large healthcare organisation provides health insurance, clinics, dental services, hospitals, and elderly care centres.
Microsoft Exchange Server
For many years, this organisation has run a large-scale, high–availability Exchange 2013 on-premises infrastructure. While Microsoft 365 has been implemented and a significant proportion of the mailboxes have been migrated to the cloud, there is still a requirement to maintain the on-premises Exchange platform for the time being to support approx. 600 special mailboxes and critical application integrations.
Since Exchange 2013 is now end-of-life, and the hardware it is running on requires a refresh, the customer decided to initiate a project to deploy Exchange Server 2016 in a virtual server environment. Exchange 2019 would have been the preferred option but this was not supported by the customer’s incumbent support partner.
Being this organisation’s primary Windows Server and Exchange support partner for over 20 years, we were asked to provide the required consultancy to complete the deployment and migration.
“Having worked with this organisation for over 20 years on a wide range of AD, Exchange and device-related projects, the end user compute team recognised our specialist Exchange expertise, so when asked, we were delighted to help with this complex upgrade and migration.”
At the beginning of the project, we discussed the requirements with the customer’s IT team and decided to retain as much of the existing configuration, like retention periods and log settings, as-is. However, any new features or configuration options were discussed and implemented, where relevant.
The existing Exchange platform ran on five physical servers and five virtual servers across two data centres in an active/passive configuration to provide the necessary availability and disaster recovery, and the new platform continues to reflect this configuration although it has been consolidated down to eight VMware virtual machines; four nodes for the mailbox servers and four nodes for the hybrid integration.
As part of the new implementation, the opportunity was also taken to optimise the configuration to use newer Exchange security standards such as TLS 1.2 only, OWA Download Domains and Extended Protection.
Once the platform was tested and ready to go live, working with the customer’s incumbent datacentre support partner, the switchover of mail flow and hybrid integration from the legacy to the new platform was carefully executed.
Following this, the mailboxes were migrated from the 2013 platform to the new 2016 platform and all connected services, endpoints and users were transitioned over with minimal impact, ultimately allowing the Exchange 2013 production platform to be decommissioned.
Finally, since there is a requirement to be able to recover mailbox data for a period of time and noting that 2013 backups cannot be recovered into a 2016 environment, we also created a separate recovery Active Directory Forest to host a single Exchange 2013 server. This will support recovery of mailbox data until the requirement expires.
“Although an upgrade from Exchange 2013 to 2016 is relatively straightforward, it is always important to plan and execute the migration carefully to ensure that there is minimal business disruption. Our long and extensive history working with Exchange on-premises means we have the required skills to deal with any Exchange requirement of any size and complexity.”
Martin Barringer, Senior Consultant, Silversands
At the end of this project, the end-of-life Exchange 2013 platform had been replaced with the 2016 platform which will give this customer the necessary time to transition away the remaining mailboxes.
The move from a significant hardware infrastructure to virtual machines also reduces the ongoing support and maintenance burden.
With no business disruption or user impact, the customer’s team is very happy with the successful transition from Exchange 2013 to the new 2016 platform.
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