Prerequisites for Installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008

Prerequisites for Installing Exchange 2007

on Windows 2008

Want to know what features and roles are required for Installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008?

There are certain prerequisites that need to be taken care of prior to installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 system, such as the installation of the .NET Framework and PowerShell.  Also required are a number of other tools such as the remote management tool for administrators that want to prepare the Active Directory schema or domain from the machine running Server 2008.  Given that each server role has a different set of requirements, be aware that there are additional features and roles that need to be considered separately.  For example, the Client Access and Mailbox servers require the IIS Web Server, but the Edge Transport server doesn’t.

Installing the requisite features involves going into the Service Manager, Features, and clicking on “Add Features…”  Under the Select Features panel are various features that can be installed on Exchange 2007, such as the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell and Remote Server Administration Tools.  It is worth noting that the installation of some of these features may also initiate the installation of certain other roles and features.  For example, clicking on the .NET Framework will result in the Web server Role Service being automatically added upon installation.

When adding the Web Server Role to the server, certain services are automatically turned on by default.  It is important to ensure that all the necessary services are turned on, one of which would be ISAPI (Internet Server Application Programming Interface) Extensions.  Under Security, ensure that basic Windows Authentication, Digest Authentication and Request Filtering are enabled, while also selecting both Static and Dynamic Content Compression under Performance.  Finally, under Management Tools, check that the IIS Management Console is selected, as with IIS Management Compatibility. The above configuration should be all that is required in order to get IIS services up and running on the target server.

Note that installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008  will fail if a requisite feature or Role Service is not installed; requiring that administrators go through the above process again.  A less error-prone way of doing it will be using the command line interface, which will be covered in the next lesson.