Had been thinking of exploring Exchange Server 2007 on my VMware machine. I have a network setup with a dummy domain and 2 domain controllers, one file server and 2 vista client machines. All of them were running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition except the member server which had Server 2008 Enterprise edition, which incidentally was 32 bit edition.
Downloaded Exchange 2007 trial from Microsoft’s website and then started the install process. Exchange 2007 requires that IIS has to be installed. So made sure that required server roles were installed prior to starting the installation. Bt despite all that it would keep giving me an error when installing the Exchange server. Read somewhere that the Domain functional level needs to be native. Checked it in my Active Directory domains and sites and it was mixed environment so tried raising level to Windows Server 2008 and re tried the install but still got same error message.
Did some more research on the web and came to know that Exchange 2007 is not compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2 edition. Seems like Microsoft was busy working on Exchange 2010 and they were in no mood to fix the issue. Instead they wanted to release Exchange 2010. So if you are planning to install Exchange 2007, better make sure that you have Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003 and not the Server 2008 R2 version.
