Installing Exchange Server 2010 : Unattended setup

It is also possible to install Exchange Server 2010 fully unattended. This may be useful when installing multiple servers, since unattended setup is actually less prone to errors. This process assumes that all the prerequisite software has been installed, including Internet Information Server and the LDIFDE program (HTTP://TINYURL.COM/LDIFDE) to prepare the Schema.

1 PrepareSchema

The first step in an unattended setup is to prepare the schema. This basically means upgrading the schema to an Exchange Server 2010 level. Several Exchange-related objects and attributes are added to the Active Directory Schema, which can take a considerable amount of time. You'll need to be patient, again.

To prepare the Schema, log on to the server as an administrator who is a member of both the Schema Admins and Enterprise Admins Security Groups. Open a command prompt, navigate to the Exchange Server 2010 installation media and type the following command:

The command line setup program will start and upgrade the Active Directory schema to an Exchange Server 2010 level. If you have multiple Domain Controllers, wait until the Schema changes have been replicated to all Domain Controllers in the forest before continuing with the next step.

2 PrepareAD

After preparing the Schema, Active Directory now has to be prepared for Exchange Server 2010 because, the Exchange Server 2010 organization is installed in the Configuration Partition of Active Directory. This is why the account used for the installation needs to be a member of the Enterprise Admins Security Group (Domain Administrators cannot write in the Configuration Partition).

Log on to the server, open a command prompt and navigate to the Exchange Server 2010 installation media, and type this command:

The Active Directory Configuration Partition will now be prepared for Exchange Server 2010 using the previously-mentioned "E14" Organization name.

Figure 1. Preparing the Active Directory Configuration Partition for Exchange Server 2010.

Please note the warning during setup; if you create an Exchange Server 2010 organization, you are not able to add any Exchange Server 2007 server roles to it!

If you want to check the creation of the Exchange Server 2010 organization you can use ADSIEdit (see Figure 8) and navigate to the Configuration container. Open CN=Configuration > CN=Services > CN=Microsoft Exchange. Right here, a new entry CN=E14 holding the Exchange Server 2010 configuration should be created.

If you have multiple Domain Controllers, wait until the Schema changes have been replicated to all Domain Controllers in the forest before continuing with the next step.

3 PrepareDomain

The last step in preparing the Active Directory environment is to prepare the domain that is going to host Exchange Server 2010.

Log on to the server using an administrator account, open a command prompt and navigate to the Exchange Server 2010 installation media. Type the following command:

Figure 2. Check the creation of the Exchange organization in Active Directory using ADSIEdit.

The current domain will now be prepared for the introduction of Exchange Server 2010. If you want to prepare all domains in the forest for Exchange Server 2010, you can also use the /PrepareAllDomains switch.

During the preparation of the domain, a container is created in the root of the domain called "Microsoft Exchange Security Groups." This container holds the following Security Groups:

• Exchange all hosted organizations

• Exchange organization administrators

• Exchange Public Folder administrators

• Exchange Recipient Administrators

• Exchange Self-Service users

• Exchange Servers

• Exchange Trusted Subsystem

• Exchange view-only administrators.

• Exchange Windows permissions.

• ExchangeLegacyInterop.

Figure 3. The Security Groups created after preparing the domain for Exchange Server 2010.

When the preparation of the domain (or indeed domains) is finished, just make sure you wait until replication to all the Domain Controllers is finished.

4 Install Server roles

The very last step is to install the actual server roles. This can be done using the setup.com program with the /mode and /roles switches. The /mode switch is used to select the "install" option, the /roles switch is used to select which server roles are installed.

For an unattended typical server setup, log on to the server and open a command prompt. Navigate to the Exchange Server 2010 installation media (one last time) and enter the following command:

The Exchange Server 2010 Hub Transport Server, Client Access Server and Mailbox Server role will now be installed in the default location, which is C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\v14.

When entered, the following will be shown on the screen:

Figure 4. Unattended setup of a typical Exchange Server 2010 server.