Hello,

I work for a school district and need to upgrade our exchange from 2007 to 2013.  We bought a new server that has server 2012 on it and is ready to be fired up.  My question is, can we do this upgrade and keep the same server name?  One reason for doing so is that I have configured email accounts on our employees private phones and don't want to have to reconfigure them all again with the new server name.  Please let me know if this is possible.  Thanks a bunch.

• Edited by Brian Kourdou 11 hours 46 minutes ago

You don't have to worry about that.  Go through the upgrade and when completed, shut down the old server. Create a CNAME with the name of the old server that points to new server. 

Assume old server name is OldServer

New server name is NewServer

Create CNAME called OldServer pointing to NewServer.

They can't be the same physical server name, and you cannot do an inplace upgrade. You can keep the same namespace for each version, but you have to split certain things up.  The articles below discuss these.

I would say is to look at these links:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2013/07/25/part-1-step-by-step-exchange-2007-to-2013-migration.aspx

And the Exchange Deployment Assistant:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exdeploy2013/Checklist?state=2419-W-AAAEAAAAQACIAAEAAQAAAAA~

If you still have some more questions, let me