Exchange Center

Why You Must Upgrade to Exchange Server SE Before October 2025

Microsoft is ending support for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 on October 14, 2025, making it essential for IT teams to upgrade to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) to maintain security and compliance.

Many people want to use multiple IP addresses on a single NIC interface with Exchange 2013 and Windows Server 2012. There are several reasons for this multi-homed IP configuration, such as various receive connectors for diverse applications (fax, SharePoint, gateways, etc.), or for an additional IIS website, amongst other things.

Many customers nowadays are running a virtualized Exchange environment, utilizing Database Availability Groups, load balanced Client Access Servers and the works. However, I also see environments where it is up to the Hypervisor of choice on the hosting of virtual machines after a (planned) fail-over. This goes for Exchange servers, but also for redundant infrastructure components like Domain Controllers or Lync Front-End servers for example.

As we are now in Part 7 of this series, let's recap the previous parts.

In Parts 1 and 2, we established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller, and we went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.

We last left off in Part 5 which covered the Directory, organization and Exchange preparation-and then went on to install the relevant Exchange servers using the unattended setup feature.

In this, Part 4 of this ENow blog series, I will take you through the provisioning of your Exchange Servers in Hyper-V, summarizing the install of Windows Server 2012 Data Centre (as we have covered the step by step install of Windows 2012 in the first part), and finally installing the prerequisites for Exchange 2013 on Windows Servers 2012.

I have been working on a large Exchange 2010 upgrade to Service Pack 2. The Exchange environment that I have been working within works well, but it has not had a lot of TLC in a while, and aside from the upgrade to Service Pack 2 for Exchange, I also needed to perform an upgrade to Service Pack 1 of the Windows 2008 R2 O/S.