The time has come for the first but definitely not the last post of 2010. I’ll kick off this year by writing a rather long and describing post about what seems to be a unique never the less strange problem when migrating a Small Business Server 2003 to 2008. Anyone that has done this migration know that when everything is done and the new SBS 2008 boots up to the actual desktop for the first time you want nothing but all green lights in the migration status report.
In this particular case it stated that Exchange Server 2007 did not install, which is not a good thing when it comes to SBS 2008. To my surprise I learnt that it was actually installed but only the hub transport role. The mailbox role and the client access role hadn’t been installed during the SBS 2008 installation/migration. Not good, indeed not good at all was my initial thought.
After trying to manually install the roles it instantly worked fine to install the mailbox role but the client access role kept on failing with the below error message.
Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:13
Client Access Role
Failed
Error:
Exchange server "SERVERNAME
DEL:e576abbf-e823-43f2-8c4a-53ec5e551dbd" was not found. Please make sure you have typed it correctly.
So after doing some research it seems that the offline address book of the Exchange Server 2003 is the crook which has lead to the migration process not installing Exchange Server 2007 correctly on the SBS 2008. Simply deleting the offline address book was the only way I could get the client access role to install in the Exchange Server 2007 on the SBS 208 machine.
After everything eventually was installed it didn’t take long before I realized that SBS 2008 keeps OWA and TS Gateway web services in its own web site in IIS called SBS Applications which Exchange is unaware of. This meaning we still have a corrupt and not so useable Exchange OWA, ActiveSync etc as Exchange per default install the web services in the web site called Default web site.
After doing a manual move of most parts it kept on failing on the virtual directories for EWS, OBA and AutoDiscover with an error message indicating that they were already in the SBS Applications web site. After a look in the applicationHost.config (located in the %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetserv\config folder) file it turned out that these virtual directories were listed under SBS Applications instead of the Default Web Site, should they be there at all.
All was well after first uninstalling the client access role in the Exchange, manually deleting the lines corresponding to EWS, OAB and AutoDiscover in the applicationHost.config file and after installing the client access role again and finally running the powershell script provided by Microsoft at step3 on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd767439(WS.10).aspx the problem was fixed.
Whatever the problem with the address book was I guess we will never know. At least I hope this little post can help someone in a similar situation when migrating to SBS 2008.