Hi Readers,
I am sharing the points that you will need to think before moving to Next Version of Exchange.
For Customers that are currently evaluating the options to move Exchange services from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 solution, below outlines the considerations before moving forward:
- Moving to Exchange 2013 will make you upgrade Enterprise Vault solution if it is on version 9.0. This is because Enterprise vault has been moved to 64 bit in the newer versions and 9.0 is incompatible with exchange 2013.
- With Exchange 2013 you will no longer require to do Layer 7 Load balancing, Session affinity is not needed. No more complexity in terms of load balancing the Exchange traffic.
- With Exchange 2013 you will have seamless upgrade experience as it does a good Job in proxying the requests from 2013 CAS to 2010 CAS. Therefore OWA /Active sync experience will be seamless for users.
- There is a drawback in terms of storage calculation as Exchange 2013 calculates the storage differently, so for a user that is on Exchange 2010 of 600 MB mailbox size we should allocate the quota of around 1 GB as a safe bet. (40% extra needs to be allocated). Below is the excerpt from Microsoft.
“When you move a mailbox from a previous version of Exchange to Exchange 2013, the mailbox size reported may increase 30 percent to 40 percent. Disk space used by the mailbox database has not increased, only the attribution of space used by each mailbox has increased. The increase in mailbox size is due to the inclusion of all item properties into quota calculations, providing a more accurate computation of space consumed by items within their mailbox. This increase may cause some users to exceed their mailbox size quotas when their mailbox is moved to Exchange 2013”
- Your organization will need to buy Licenses for Exchange 2013 server as well as CALs, Please check your Microsoft Agreement/Licenses.
- With Exchange 2013 IOPS have been greatly reduced, so therefore footprint can be reduced. Multi Role/Virtualization strategy can be further utilized.
- Legacy Applications that rely on outlook 2003 will not work with Exchange 2013, so you have to maintain the coexistence with Exchange 2010 till the applications upgrade happens. Excerpt from Microsoft:
“There is no support for Outlook 2003. If you’re still running Office 2003 in your environment and intend to upgrade to Exchange 2013 then you will need to upgrade Office first.”
- With Exchange 2013 users have the ability to access OWA offline; this will benefit Remote/Mobile users as OWA can be accessed while they are in remote areas where internet bandwidth is limited or no access to internet.
- With Exchange 2013 you will be able to apply DLP policies which are of great interest to your organization Security Teams.
New Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities for identifying and protecting “sensitive data.” DLP policies are based on regulatory standards, including PII and PCI. Also: new policy tips in Outlook 2013 can be set to inform users about potential policy violations.
- With Exchange 2013 Public folders are now part of DAG, there is no longer separate Public folder database. Another complexity of managing Public folder databases differently is no longer required & they will share the Same HA model as mailbox databases. One more thing these are now termed as Modern Public folders.
Tech Wizard
Tech Wizard 