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Andy Grogan [ MVP (Exchange) ]Andy is an experienced senior IT professional who is comfortable managing both large, complex technical IT environments and operating at the strategic IT direction level. He has a strong background in 3rd tier technical, data center operations management and solution design which has been built up over 16 years of experience within the IT industry in both private and public sectors - working with many frameworks and disciplines. During his career, Andy has held roles ranging from 1st and 2nd line support, head of 3rd line operations, and head of technical services all the way through head of IT. Holding such a diverse array of positions has given him a deep understanding not only of how IT organizations work from the ground level up, but how they can and should operate delivering quality services to the businesses which they support. Andy has a demonstrable track record in the design, sourcing, project management and implementation of large scale technical projects and a very eclectic technical experience base, founded predominately in Microsoft technologies (Exchange, AD, SQL, SCOM, Windows Server). He has also worked with or managed the delivery of IBM (storage, P-Series and TSM), HP (servers and storage), Cisco (routers, switches, firewalls, IPT), VMWare (ESX, ESXi,VSphere), Citrix(MetaFrame,XPe,PS4,XenApp) and Data Center / IT operations management. Andy is a 4-time recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valued Professional award for Exchange Server (2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012), and a well-known author within the international Exchange community, writing content for sites such as TechTarget, MSExchange.org, ENow and his own personal site telnetport25.com.
Ok, yes I know – I said that Part 8 was the last in this particular series – but then Microsoft went and released Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for Exchange 2013 (on April 2nd) which left me feeling that if I did not cover this – then the LAB series was not properly completed. For those of you who are just joining us – you can find links to the previous parts below.
We are now in the final stretch in this series with this being the second to last part of creating a test lab from scratch with Windows Servers 2012 and Exchange 2013. I could in truth perhaps go on forever as there are loads of things that I have not covered. But that is the beauty of a test lab, once you have one that is up and running – it is yours to do with as you choose and that is what I hope that you will all do.
As we are now in Part 7 of this series, let's recap the previous parts.
In Parts 1 and 2, we established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller, and we went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.
We last left off in Part 5 which covered the Directory, organization and Exchange preparation-and then went on to install the relevant Exchange servers using the unattended setup feature.
Here in Part 5 of this blog series, I will take you through the process of installing Exchange on the first Client Access and Mailbox Server art-MBXCAS-01 – this includes Active Directory and Organization preparation. I will then round off with explaining how you can then go onto complete the installation on the remaining servers.
In this, Part 4 of this ENow blog series, I will take you through the provisioning of your Exchange Servers in Hyper-V, summarizing the install of Windows Server 2012 Data Centre (as we have covered the step by step install of Windows 2012 in the first part), and finally installing the prerequisites for Exchange 2013 on Windows Servers 2012.
Times change, people change – and as well all know, technology changes as well. The last part of that sentence could not be more true of Windows, Active Directory and Exchange Server recently.
I have been working on a large Exchange 2010 upgrade to Service Pack 2. The Exchange environment that I have been working within works well, but it has not had a lot of TLC in a while, and aside from the upgrade to Service Pack 2 for Exchange, I also needed to perform an upgrade to Service Pack 1 of the Windows 2008 R2 O/S.