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Exchange Team Blog
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"Can I install Exchange 2010 Beta in production?"

The_Exchange_Team's avatar
The_Exchange_Team
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 17, 2009
This question comes up during every Beta release (see here and here) and we have again seen it pop up in both Exchange 2010 forum as well as on our blog. The short answer is: No! Many people know...
Published Apr 17, 2009
Version 1.0
Deleted's avatar
Deleted
Jun 20, 2009
Hi all.  I'm new to Exchange admin and I'd like to do a test conversion from Exchange 2003 SP1 to Exch 2010 in a lab.  I have a couple of available hyper-v servers.  My goal is to run the 2003 to 2010 migration in the lab to get comfortable with all of the steps and also to see what issues might arise.  I'd like to restore a copy of our production Exchange 2003 mailstores from a backup onto a test server and do the conversion.  In order to restore to the lab environment I assume I have to be on the same domain since all of the users are in AD.  If so, what steps are needed to create the lab environment?  Do I create a new AD forest on an isolated network and then restore my production AD database into it, and then restore my Exch 2003 databases, or is there an easier way?