Why can’t I in-place upgrade Exchange 2010..?

You may have seen the “Geek Out with Perry” series already, but he’s back with his latest instalment.

Here are the main reason’s as to why a mailbox move is required, to hear it from the man himself, go here

  1. Surprise! It’s not about the laziness of the Exchange Devs
  2. In major releases we tend to make substantial changes to our architecture to take advantage of exponential changes occurring on the hardware front. Doing this in a backwards compatible way often leads to substantial compromises that leads to a more expensive and less reliable TCO.
  3. Certainly to fully take advantage of the changes in the release requires rethinking the hardware design. Over the past couple of releases, doing this properly will reduce costs so substantially that continuing to run the old hardware would be un-economic even through it is fully depreciated.
  4. Given the rapidly improving hardware and the fact that the most expensive component (storage) wears out. Regular hardware refreshes in the order of every 3-4 years are needed. Doing both a major-version in-place upgrade followed by a migration to new hardware is a model that combines the worst of both approaches
  5. The migration model is well suited to most organizations because it allows you to move your least sensitive mailboxes first, your most sensitive mailboxes ( execs? application mailboxes?) last and have a great coexistence story.