Finishing the Migration

To finish the migration, you have to complete a few final tasks:

1. Upgrade your connectors.

2. Upgrade the Internet Mail Connector.

3. Upgrade foreign connectors, if necessary.

4. Replace the Gateway Address Routing Table (GWART) with the Link State Table (LST).

Connector Upgrades

If you are in a multi-site, multi-routing group environment and need to upgrade your connectors, you must upgrade them to be Routing Group Connectors (RGCs). This process will work fine because Exchange 2003 servers use RPCs to talk to a Site Connector and SMTP to talk to a Routing Group Connector.

If you are upgrading an X.400 Connector, you’ll be happy to learn that the X.400 Connector is preserved, but TP4 information isn’t preserved because TP4 is not supported in Windows Server 2003.

Internet Mail Connector Upgrade

If you are upgrading an Internet Mail Connector (IMC), you need to know that the IMC is upgraded to an SMTP Connector. The configuration information is preserved in the connector. However, the SMTP Connector isn’t necessary for normal SMTP traffic: the SMTP Virtual Server (VS) can handle this function quite well.

If you need to remove the IMC from your mixed environment or reroute your Exchange 2003 server incoming e-mail at the firewall, perform the following steps. First, swap Exchange 2003 server IP addresses with IP addresses of the Exchange 5.5 IMC server. Then run Ipconfig /flushdns and Ipconfig /registerdns at the command prompt to re-register Exchange 2003 with DNS. Restart the Net Logon service on Exchange 2003 and update your MX records to reflect any changes. Once you accomplish this, remove the IMC on the Exchange 5.5 server. After the IMC is removed, recalculate the Gateway Address Routing Table (GWART) in Exchange 5.5.

Upgrading Foreign Connectors

Foreign connectors such as MSMail, IBM Lotus cc:Mail, and Lotus Notes are preserved along with their configuration information. Any other connectors, such as TP4, RAS, SNADS, OfficeVision, and connectors developed using the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit, are not preserved or supported in Exchange 2003. If you need them after the upgrade, leave Exchange 2003 in mixed mode and keep an Exchange 5.5 server on hand to run them. You’ll need to preserve an Exchange 5.5 server until the connectors are no longer needed.

GWART and LST

Regarding keeping track of link state information, the LST is smarter, faster, and better at it than the GWART and thus replaces the GWART. The ADC and the SRS replicate Exchange 5.5 routing information to the LST, but the state information on Exchange 5.5 connectors won’t be available in the LST. In addition, the GWART isn’t sophisticated enough to include state information from the LST.