Installation Prerequisites | Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Delta Guide

Now that you have some idea of what is in the different editions of Exchange and how they are licensed, it's time to look at some of the prerequisites required for installing and configuring Exchange 2003 in your organization.

Later chapters will explore the specific details of what you need to do to prepare your organization for upgrading to or installing Exchange 2003, but the following section is a good summary of what you will need to have in place before getting started.

General Network Requirements

To start, certain general networking requirements must be met. DNS and WINS must be installed and configured in your domain. For the domain controllers, global catalog servers in the domain, and the Active Directory, you must be running either Windows 2000 Server Service Pack (SP) 3 or Windows Server 2003.

Hardware

Hardware for Exchange is always tricky because the required hardware depends on the number of users, usage patterns, and service level expectations. With that said, you must have a server that is at least an Intel Pentium 133MHz or greater, with at least 256MB of RAM and 500MB of disk space. (200MB must be available on the system drive.)

In addition to the hard drive space requirements, you must make sure that the drive is formatted using the NT File System (NTFS) as opposed to the file allocation table (FAT) file system.

CALCULATING HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

Although these hardware recommendations might be fine for a single-server installation or pilot for Exchange, be sure to check out the Exchange 2003 Capacity Planning and Topology calculator available on TechNet to determine the correct hardware requirements for your organization, users, and usage patterns.

Operating System

For installing and configuring Exchange 2003 on a server, you have a choice of either Windows 2000 Server SP3+ or Windows Server 2003.

WINDOWS 2000 SERVER

Although Exchange can run quite happily on Windows 2000 Server SP3 or greater, some features within Exchange are specific to Windows Server 2003 and are not available if you deploy Exchange on Windows 2000 Server. For a list of these features, check out Chapter 3, "Installation," page 19.

graphics/shortsig_icon.gif EXCHANGE AND WINDOWS VERSIONS

Exchange Server 2003's ability to run on both Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 is a key to migrating easily from Exchange 2000, which runs only on Windows 2000 Server.

Server Components

In addition to the correct operating system, you need to have a number of other components installed and configured before you can install Exchange 2003. Following is a checklist of these items:

Internet Information Services (IIS)
World Wide Web Publishing Service
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) service
.NET Framework
ASP.NET

If you are installing Exchange 2003 on a server running Windows 2000, Exchange Setup installs and enables the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET automatically. You must install IIS, the World Wide Web Publishing Service, the SMTP service, and the NNTP service manually before you run the Exchange Server 2003 Installation Wizard.

If you are installing Exchange 2003 in a native Windows Server 2003 forest or domain, none of these services is enabled by default. You must enable the services manually before running Exchange Server 2003 Installation Wizard.

When you install Exchange on a new server, only the required services are enabled. For example, Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), Internet Message Access Protocol version 4 (IMAP4), and NNTP services are disabled by default on all your Exchange 2003 servers. You should only enable services that are essential for performing Exchange 2003 tasks.

Also, if you plan to cluster your Exchange servers, you will need to already have clustering installed and configured on the Windows 2003 servers where you want to install Exchange.

WEB RESOURCE

In addition to these requirements, there are some special considerations you must make for sites that are currently running Exchange 5.5. For more information on requirements for Exchange 5.5 sites, go to the Delta Guide series Web site at http://www.deltaguideseries.com and enter article ID A030101.