As of today, the Preview of Exchange 2019 public accessible. I have just installed the preview on a Windows Server 2016 Full GUI, here is my first impression of the new version.
The preview can be downloaded here:
Here are my personal first impressions of the new Exchange version. Of course, not everything is complete here yet, not only Exchange 2019 is a preview version, but also these articles 
Installation
The test VM for Exchange 2019 is a Windows Server 2016 Full GUI with 16 GB RAM and 2 CPUs, a domain controller runs on another Windows 2016 VM. Server 2016 is also used as the domain and overall structure function level.
The welcome screen looks exactly the same as Exchange 2016:
The installation of Exchange 2016 was already no witchcraft, this will not change with Exchange 2019. The 3 links currently still lead to the Exchange 2016 resources, but this is to be expected in the preview:
However, the license terms appear to be up to date:
Nothing new in the next dialog either, here you can still only choose between "Use recommended settings" and "Do not use recommended settings". I have selected "Use recommended settings":
There are also no changes to the setup of the rollers. However, something has changed under the hood. The Unified Messaging (UM) role is no longer on board. Those who previously used UM can switch to Azure VoiceMail or third-party solutions:
I am curious about the version number of Exchange 2019, Exchange 2013 is version 15, Exchange 2016 has version number 15.1. In the installation path, the path indicates that Exchange 2019 also has version 15 in its name, this could of course also be a remnant from the Exchange 2016 setup routine:
Nothing changes in the next dialog compared to Exchange 2016:
The built-in protection against malware in Exchange 2016 was not exactly useful, I hope that this has been improved:
The installation of the prerequisites also runs automatically:
However, the readiness check fails on a bare Windows server, although Windows features such as IIS are installed automatically, .NET Framework and UCMA are not. Since the UM role no longer exists, I suspect that UCMA will no longer be a requirement for the final Exchange 2019 version. The current .NET version will certainly be supported until the final version is released. I have therefore installed the same prerequisites as for Exchange 2016 CU10 for the time being:
After installing the Exchange 2016 prerequisites, only the warning appears that Setup automatically extends the Active Directory schema and indicates that Exchange 2013/2016 servers can no longer be installed after the installation:
Setup is running, I'm excited:
Detailed logs are again written during the installation. These log files are often gold in the event of an error:
The installation took about 45 minutes in my test environment, but I didn't look closely at the clock.
Exchange 2019 takes up a good 10 GB on the disk after installation:
Impressions of the configuration will follow in part 2 of the article:
