Hurrah! If you have not yet heard: Exchange Server 2019 Public preview was announced earlier, and it is the first version of Exchange that you can install on Server Core!
Now, while that’s great news...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Our plan is to require Windows 2012R2 forest functional level at release. We will discuss more about system requirements at Ignite and at launch.
My humble Opinion is that the FFL is the most difficult requirement to beat in large Deployments as ours. Only Recently we manage to Upgrade to Win2008R2 FFL in order to be able to Deploy Exchange 2016 CU7 and up (we are at Exchange 2013 CU21).
I strongly believe that only after one year of Mandatory FFL Win2008R2 (Sept 2017 CU7 for Exchange 2016 Deployments) it is too early to move to Win2012R2 FFL for Exchange 2019...
- What, you don't upgrade all your domain controllers instantly when a new version of Windows Server is out?
- We have hardware dependencies (OLD HP ProLiant ML Servers who do not support Windows Server 2012R2) on our Branches. That is the reason why we cannot upgrade our FFL at the moment.
- While I tend to agree with these sentiments, you do realize the age of that FFL? Windows 2008 R2 came out at the end of 2009. Microsoft can only support it for so long. Also, Windows 2012 R2 and Windows 2016 servers OS's have been out for five and two years respectively. What dependencies do you have that prevent an upgrade to at least Windows 2012 R2 FFL?