Verifying Prerequisites

Before you can begin your installation, you will need to ensure that you have met the prerequisites for installing Exchange 2003 in your organization. You first looked at these requirements in Chapter 1, "Introducing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003," but here is a quick checklist to run through before you proceed further:

• Is the target server part of a network with DNS and WINS installed and configured?

• Do your domain controller, catalog servers, and Active Directory run on Windows 2000 Server SP3 or Windows Server 2003?

• Do you have a server that has at least an Intel Pentium 133MHz or greater processor, with 256MB of RAM, 500MB of disk space, and 200MB available on the system drive?

• Are the drives in the server formatted using the NT File System (NTFS), as opposed to the FAT file system?

• Is the server operating system either Windows 2000 Server SP3+ or Windows Server 2003?

• Have the following components been installed and configured?

  • 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

PREREQUISITES ON WINDOWS SERVER 2003

If you're running Windows Server 2003 on the computer that will hold Exchange, double-check those IIS-related prerequisites. Remember that Windows 2003 doesn't install IIS or any of its components by default, so you must make sure that these items are selected for installation.

After you have verified that you have these prerequisites covered, you can start preparing your environment to install Exchange.