Sep 17 2014
4 Things to Know Before Migrating to Exchange 2013
You are about to migrate mail servers to Exchange 2013? Here are a few issues I came across while migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2013. Please read first.
1/ I had to add all Exchange servers DNS entries in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, since email got stuck in queues. I was also getting timeouts while sending emails (some sessions would never get a response to the last dot ending the message).
Could this be due to IPv6 name resolution? Maybe. There is no choice anyway as it is not recommended to disable IPv6 on Exchange 2013. IPv6 is also enabled on my Domain Controller though.
2/ When adding a receive connector, make sure to select “FrontEndTransport” but “HubTransport”.
If you do, you will end up with the SMTP service crashing every few hours and will not receive mail at all!
Sounds insane, but a lot of administrators have experienced it. Check this Microsoft post.
3/ Public folders migration hasn’t worked although I followed Microsoft documentation.
I could not even remove them since they were created on a previous Exchange version.
My last resort was to remove the entry with Microsoft ADSI Edit tool on the domain controller.
4/ When installing Cumulative Update 3, EMC (Exchange Management Console) wouldn’t start, but was throwing an Access denied exception, as mentioned here.
That is a lot of shit going on for a new release supposed to be stable! Please upgrade to SP1 and apply all following CUs. Hoping Microsoft fixed these issues!