Exchange 2019 is currently only available as a Technical Preview, so I cannot publish detailed instructions on how to migrate from Exchange 2016 to Exchange 2019 at this point. Nevertheless, I was interested to know whether migration is already possible. At the moment, this is of course only recommended in test environments, as the Technical Preview is not suitable for production environments.
For my first test, I set up a simple test environment consisting of 3 VMs: a domain controller, an Exchange 2016 server and an Exchange 2019 server. All VMs use Windows Server 2016 as the operating system. Outlook 2016 is used as the test client.
Overview of the test environment
A small overview of the surroundings:
The Exchange 2016 server was configured to the host names outlook.frankysweblab.de for all web services. The name autodiscover.frankysweblab.de was defined for Autodiscover. The corresponding URLs for the web services and the certificate with the corresponding names are adopted. The certificate for this test comes from an internal CA:
In the DNS, the hostnames outlook.frankysweblab.de and autodiscover.frankysweblab.de point to the Exchange 2016 server before the migration:
Internal and external URLs are configured to the host name "outlook.frankysweblab.de" for all virtual directories:
Only one Outlook 2016 is installed on the VM EXCL1, which accesses the test mailbox "Frank" on the Exchange 2016 server:
So much for the test environment.
Installation of Exchange 2019
I have installed the Exchange 2019 Technical Preview on the VM EXLAB2. The prerequisites were checked without any errors:
The installation of the Exchange 2019 Preview also went smoothly.
Immediately after installation, I configured the URLs to the hostnames outlook.frankysweblab.de and autodiscover.frankysweblab.de (identical to the Exchange 2016 server).
I also exported the certificate of the Exchange 2016 server and imported it to the Exchange 2019 server. The certificate was then assigned to the services:
After configuring the Exchange 2019 server, I also directly changed the DNS records to the IP of the Exchange 2019 server::
Migration to Exchange 2019
Immediately after the installation and configuration, I moved the system mailboxes to the database of the Exchange 2019 server:
After the system mailboxes, I also moved the two user mailboxes "Administrator" and "Frank" to the new database:
You still have to be patient with the migration batches until the status finally changes to "Completed". Outlook 2016 was continuously connected to Exchange during the migration of the "Frank" mailbox, a restart was not necessary. The version changes accordingly in the Outlook connection status, here once for Exchange 2016:
And here as soon as the mailbox has been moved to an Exchange 2019 database:
The rest was then done quickly, I just deleted the Exchange 2016 database and uninstalled the server.
So the test migration in the lab worked really well.
Conclusion
The test migration to Exchange 2019 Preview went smoothly. The chances are therefore good that migration will be possible directly with the release of the Exchange 2019 RTM. This has not always been the case in the past. In principle, Exchange migration was always possible from the two previous versions. For Exchange 2019, this would mean that Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 can be migrated directly to Exchange 2019 (N-2). Exchange 2010 can therefore probably no longer be migrated directly to Exchange 2019. However, I will still try this out in a lab.
Detailed migration instructions will be available here when Exchange 2019 is officially released.