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Exchange 2010 RTM: Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer

This is a pretty simple but effective tool. It looks and feel exactly like the ExBPA. You don’t necessarily want to risk checking the prerequisites for Exchange 2010 by running the setup program in a production environment, especially since it will extend the schema if you install the Exchange 2010 tools. The ExPDA can be downloaded here.

The ExPDA performes the following checks:

The analyzer inspects Active Directory and looks for prerequisites for Exchange 2010 as well as each existing Exchange server. The analyzer also inspects each server and;

• Reports the amount of mailboxes on the server.
• Reports the AD site where the server exists.
• Checks the domain and DNS domain membership
• Reporting the number of Active Directory trees, domains, sites, admin groups, routing groups, Exchange 5.5 servers, Exchange 2000 servers, Exchange 2003 servers, total mailboxes, Windows 2000 Active Directory servers, Windows Server Active Directory servers, Windows Server Active Directory servers. Report how many Active Directory domain/sites have Exchange servers installed.
• Verifying that the Schema Master is Windows 2003 SP1 or later.
• Identifying Active Directory domains that are not in native mode.
• Identifying Active Directory sites that do not have a global catalog server running Windows 2003 SP1 or later.
• Verifying that there are zero Active Directory Connector servers in existence.
• Identifying any SMTP site links in existence.
• Verifying that the Exchange organization is in native mode.
• Identifying any non-standard proxy address generators.
• Identifying whether you have any ambiguously defined email addresses in your recipient policies.
• Identifying any non-MAPI public folder hierarchies (a.k.a. AppTLH’s) in use.
• Identifying Routing Groups that span Active Directory sites.
• Identifying any Active Directory sites that span Routing Groups.
• Identifying any Routing Group Connectors that have specialized settings (activation, max size, accept/reject lists, restrict message type/priority).
• Identifying any SMTP Connectors that support non-SMTP address spaces.
• Identifying any SMTP Connectors that use inline domain-wildcarding for address spaces (e.g. *foo.com instead of *.foo.com).
• Identifying any X.400 Connectors in the topology.
• Identifying any EDK-based Connectors in the topology (excluding Notes).
• Verifying that any servers running Exchange 2003 have SP2 or later.
• Verifying that any servers running Exchange 2007 have SP2 or later.
• Identifying any SMTP virtual servers that are not using port 25 for incoming/outgoing.
• Verifying that all Exchange 2003 servers have SuppressStateChanges set.
• Identifying any Exchange 2003 servers that have active NNTP newsfeeds.
• Identifying any Exchange 2003 servers that use the Event Scripting service.
• Identifying any Exchange 2003 servers that have the ExIFS (a.k.a. M:) drive enabled.
• Identifying any parts of Active Directory that have Access Control Entry inheritance disabled.

 Start the program.

Check for updates (if the workstation you’re running the ExPDA on can connect to the Internet).

Select a DC to connect to.

The analyzer only offers a single choice: “Exchange 2010 Readiness Check”

I had already extended the schema for Exchange 2010 in the lab.

February 24, 2010 - Posted by ivorb | Exchange 2010 RTM | Exchange 2010 ExPDA