Posted by In this part we will be preparing Active Directory for exchange server installation. A piece of advice at this point, it is STRONGLY Recomended to take backup of your active directory.
Extend AD Schema for Exchange Installation
The ad admin account that will be used for schema extention must be member of the Schema Admin and Enterprise Admins AD Groups. Without proper group membership the the Schema preparation and Exchange installation will fail.
The member server where the Exchange Server will be installed must also be part of the same AD domain.
Run the following Powershell Commandlet to extend the schema for exchange server 2019. PS Should be started with Elevated permissions. I am running this command on the member server where the exchange server is to be installed.
.\Setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /PrepareSchema
Please also note the command is to be run in the Setup.exe folder of exchange server installation files.
Prepare Active Directory
Once active directory schema is extended then we need to prepare active directory for Exchange Server. Exchange server installation will create objects and containers to store information related to exchange. These containers and objects are called Exchange Organisation.
To prepare active directory for exchange the user account must be member of the Enterprise Admin and Schema Admins security group. If your active directory consists of multiple Domain Controllers or DCs the you must wait for the previous step to replicate across all DCs. Finally you need to choose the name of the Exchange Organisation. The organisation name cannot be blank and cannot be longer than 64 characters. Valid characters are A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9, hyphen or dash (-), and space, but leading or trailing spaces aren’t allowed. Once Exchange Organisation has been named then it cannot be changed, so choose wisely and type correctly. The following command in PS will prepare AD for Exchange.
.\Setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /PrepareAD /OrganizationName: “Your Organisation Name”
Now you must wait again for this to replicate across all DCs (incase of multi DC envoirnment)
Prepare AD Domains
Final step is to prepare AD Domain or All domains in the forest. I am going to choose to prepare all domain. This will be a multi domain hosted exchange envoirnment.
.\Setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /PrepareAllDomains
Choose the Active Directory domains to prepare
Your account needs to be a member of the Domain Admins group in the domain that you want to prepare. If the domain that you want to prepare was created after you ran /PrepareAD, your account also needs to be a member of the Organization Management role group in Exchange.
.\Setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /PrepareDomain:<Your Domain Name>
To be continued to part 3…