Exhange 2007 to 2010 Upgrade - "Reboot Needed"

Over Christmas we upgraded our old Exchange 2007 server (in which the public folder store was playing up) to Exchange 2010 SP1.

We hit a number of problems with this, and this is what we had to do.

• The old server would not upgrade directly to 2010 - it needed to have SP2 on it first
• It would not install SP2 because it "needed a reboot" first - and kept saying so after multiple reboots (yes, that it pretty typical with MS stuff, I know)
• None of the normal places in the registry that make you think some action is needed after a reboot were populated - so it was something very obscure
• We created a new Exchange 2007SP2 server instead and migrated the mailboxes to it. Regular readers will know we use VMWare here, so that wasn't hard (although time consuming)
• We then removed the old 2007 server from the exchange environment and destroyed it
• Now we created a new 2010SP1 server and migrated the mailboxes to it

The "new" 2007 server is still in the infrastructure at the moment, but will eventually be removed and replaced with another 2010 server to create a cluster. That will probably have to wait to the next college holiday at Easter, though.

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