Hi everyone,

I have a single Exchange 2007 VM as well as 4 x Exchange 2013 SP1  servers in a single organisation. Exchange 2013 SP1 servers are also VM's, with 2 x CAS and 2 x MBX and a single DAG. All of these existing servers use a single namespace for CAS services of mail.domain.com. In public and internal DNS that name resolves to the IP address of the Exchange 2013 DAG IP.

I'm replacing the above 5 VM's with 4 physical servers running 2013 CU7. In the architecture I'm using IIS Application Request Routing (ARR) as a clustered load balancer and reverse proxy. This will be used for all HTTP(S) traffic. (OWA, RPC/HTTPS, OAB, Autodiscover etc.).

e.g. oa.domain.com (Outlook Anywhere), outlook.domain.com (OWA), oab.domain.com etc. A key point in this design is that Outlook Anywhere will go via the reverse proxy / load balancer, including internal traffic.

The new Exchange 2013 servers are in place, as is the load balancer / RP, databases created etc. At the minute the virtual directories for the new servers have their URL's / Hostnames set to the Exchange 2007 / existing Exchange 2013 single namespace. So Outlook Anywhere, OWA, ECP, OAB etc. all have their URL's / Hostnames pointing to mail.domain.com (which resolves to the DAG IP of the current / legacy Exchange 2013 environment).

The next steps are to get the CAS traffic flowing over the new Exchange servers - which is a case of setting the virtual directories for the relevant services to point to the new per-protocol namespaces. So I'll set OWA to use https://outlook.domain.com/OWA.

My question is.... Do I do this ONLY for the new Exchange servers, or should I also update the URL's that the existing Exchange 2013 / 2007 servers use? For example:

Current Settings

Old Exchange 2013 Server 1
External OWA Virtual Directory: https://mail.domain.com/OWA

Old Exchange 2007 Server:
External OWA Virtual Directory: https://mail.domain.com/OWA

New Exchange 2013 Server 1:
External OWA Virtual Directory: https://mail.domain.com/OWA

New Setting

External OWA Virtual Directory: https://outlook.domain.com/OWA

Question

I need to set the NEW Exchange 2013 servers External URL for the OWA Virtual Directory to be https://outlook.domain.com/OWA. But do I need to set this on the existing / legacy Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2013 Servers also? Or do I leave them, migrate the databases and then decommission the servers in due course without worrying about updating the URL's and hostnames on them?

In particular, what do I do about Outlook Anywhere? Again, I need to update the Internal and External Hostnames for the RPC Virtual Directory to point to the new name - oa.domain.com - but do I set this only on the NEW servers, or on all servers?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Big thanks in advance!

Steve

Hi Steve,

please see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exdeploy2013/Checklist?state=2419-W-DACEAgAAQACAAEEAAQAAAAg~ for further assistance. You cannot use the same namespace for your Ex 2007 environment.

So you must configure a (new/different) namespace for the new Exchange 2013 environment.Typically, if you want to keep your old namespace and it looks like https://mail.domain.com/OWA , you will configure your Exchange 2013 URLs to start using https://mail.domain.com/... while you need to reconfigure the Exchange 2007 namespace to   https://mail.domain.com/OWA .

If you want to move to https://mail.domain.com/... with your new Environment, you configure the Exchange 2013 CAS to use https://outlook.domain.com/... while you keep https://mail.domain.com/... for your Exchange 2007 CAS.

So you will configure only the new environment to https://outlook.domain.com/... , please do not forget to change your autodiscover (SRV or A record).

Regards,
Martin

Thanks Martin,

So do I have to change the OutlookProvider too? Our current Exchange 2013 environment uses mail.domain.com, and our legacy 2007 uses legacymail.domain.com. I want to migrate to oa.domain.com for our new environment as that IP is hosted by our load balancer.

Regarding OA, do I just update the set-outlookanywhere URL's on the new Exchange 2013, or both the current Exchange 2013 and new Exchange 2013 server?

Additionally, do I need to update the OutlookProvider settings (the msstd: ones)?

Thanks - Steve

Hi Stevehoot,

please find the answer on http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2008/09/29/3406352.aspx

Usually I expect you to adjust your Outlook Provider.  

Regards,
Martin