Introduction
In Part 5, we moved the public folder mailboxes and user mailboxes to Exchange 2016 as part of the preparation for decommissioning our Exchange 2013 server.
In this part, we’ll move the system mailboxes and uninstall Exchange.
To read other parts in this series, go to:
- Exchange 2013 to 2016 Migration (Part 1)
- Exchange 2013 to 2016 Migration (Part 2)
- Exchange 2013 to 2016 Migration (Part 3)
- Exchange 2013 to 2016 Migration (Part 4)
- Exchange 2013 to 2016 Migration (Part 5)
Migrate email relay receive connectors and other applications to Exchange 2016
You may be asking what this actually means because Exchange 2016 has its own receive connectors. Basically, this is in case you have any applications/devices that are relaying email through your Exchange 2013 server. You will need to create the same receive connector on the Exchange 2016 server and configure it with the same IP ranges, authentication settings and permissions groups.
Once done, you’ll need to reconfigure your applications/devices to relay email through the Exchange 2016 server. If you’ve configured your applications/devices to use a DNS name such as smtp.litwareinc.com then this can be as easy as simply changing the A record or CNAME record to resolve to the Exchnge 2016 server IP.
If you have applications that user Exchange 2013 services in other ways then these need to be migrated to Exchange 2016 as our next step will remove Exchange 2013 from the organization.
Uninstall Exchange 2013
Uninstall what? Ok, agreed – some testing would be good before we burn our bridges and do this. It’s a good idea to stop services on Exchange 2013 one by one till eventually the server is no longer used for any services. Once done and if there are no issues, you can be confident that the server is no longer required for any Exchange services and that all has been migrated to Exchange 2016.
To uninstall Exchange, go to add/remove programs and double click on “Microsft Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 10” (or whatever CU you have installed):
Click next on the confirmation window below:
Exchange setup then runs a number of checks to ensure that Exchange can be uninstalled. Once complete, click uninstall:
The Exchange uninstall now starts:
When the uninstall completes, go ahead and reboot your server, remove it from the domain and then remove the
AD computer object to finish decommissioning your server.
Conclusion
In this last part, we have moved the system mailboxes from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2016, migrated our applications and devices to Exchange 2016 then decommissioned our Exchange 2013 server. The Exchange 2013 to 2016 migration is now complete.
In upcoming posts, I’ll demonstrate how to set up a highly available Exchange 2016 messaging infrastructure including CAS load balancing and MBX high availability (database availability group).