Exchange 2010 Prerequisites

Below are prerequisistes for Exchange 2010, I endorse that go over this document to ensures that all the prerequisites are met before installing Exchange 2010. Also, if you are in an existing Exchange environment, you should understand the coexistence situations that are supported for Exchange 2010 and previousversions of Exchange.

Virtualization Prerequisites

A hypervisor virtualization software is running:

Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology
Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
Any third-party hypervisor that has been validated under the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program¹⁷.

The Exchange guest virtual machine prerequisites:

Proper tools installed (Integration tools or VMware tools)
Is deployed on the Windows Server 2008 with SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
Unified Messaging server role is not supported in a virtualization environment.

The storage used by the Exchange guest machine for storage of Exchange data (for example, mailbox databases or Hub transport queues) can be virtual storage of a fixed size (for example, fixed virtual hard disks (VHDs) in a Hyper-V environment), NAS storage that's presented to the guest as block-level storage via the hypervisor isn't supported. The following virtual disk requirements apply for volumes used to store Exchange data:

Virtual disk must be fixed
Virtual disks that dynamically expanding disk is not supported.
Virtual disks Snapshots are not supported.

DAG members are not support on Virtualized environments.
The operating system for an Exchange guest machine must use a disk that has a size equal to at least 15 GB plus the size of the virtual memory that's allocated to the guest machine

Client Prerequisites

Exchange 2010 supports the below versions of Microsoft Outlook and Entourage:

Outlook 2010
Outlook 2007
Outlook 2003
Entourage 2008

OS Prerequisites

64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard with Service Pack 2 (SP2)
64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with SP2
64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise

AD Prerequisites

Active Directory must be at Windows Server 2003 forest functionality mode or higher
Schema master must be running one of the followings:
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP1 or later (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard or Enterprise
Global Catalog must be running one of the followings:
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with SP1 or later (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP1 or later (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard or Enterprise

Coexistence prerequisites

Exchange Server 2003	Supported
Exchange 2007	Supported
Mixed Exchange 2007 and Exchange Server 2003 organization	Supported