Updating Your AD Schema and Preparing the Domain.
What is the AD Schema?
* Consider it like the blueprint for all your objects and attributes within AD.
Do you need to update the schema?
* Not in smaller environments (unless it is a policy) because it will occur automatically if you install Exchange with an account that has permissions to prepare AD and the domain.
We prepare ahead of time from the command line the commands are:
-Setup /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions (or setup /pl)
-Setup /PrepareSchema (or setup /ps) ( this will also do legacyexchangepermissions)
-Setup /PrepareAD (or setup /p) ( this will also do schema and legacy)
Make sure you’re in enterprise admin group and for schema, schema admin group.
How do you prepare the domain?
* From the command line the commands are:
– setup /PrepareDomain (or setup /pd)
– Setup /PrepareDomain:<DomainFQDN>(or setup /pd:<FQDN)
– Setup /PrepareAllDomains (or setup /pad)
You can confirm that these commands completed successfully by looking for the organizational unit called Microsoft exchange security groups (10-11 security groups created).
Give this time to replicate throughout the organization.
I ran:
D:> setup /PrepareAD /OrganizationName: jasoncoltrin
You can cancel the setup.
You can co-exist with an existing 2007 environment. So you can be running Exchange 2007 and 2010 at the same time. However, you cannot install/run Exchange 2007 after 2010 is installed first.
Once this finishes, you will run
D: setup /PrepareDomain
That’s it, your environment is now ready to install the Exchange 2010 system in your domain.
A good majority of the content provided in my Blog’s Exchange series is derived from J. Peter Bruzzese’ excellent Train Signals Exchange Server 2010 Video Disk Series, as well as my own Exchange 2010 lab. Trainsignal.com is an invaluable source for accurate, easy to understand, IT information and training. http://www.trainsignal.com