Installing Exchange 2010 SP1

My next adventure in building my own test environment was to install Exchange so I can mess with email and stuff.

I installed Exchange Server 2010 SP1 from an MSDN image into a virtual machine (VM) running Windows Server 2008 R2. First I used Windows Update to bring down ~90 updates including IE9.

The initial 5-step setup program for Exchange (I shall call this “phase 1”) says it requires .Net Framework 3.5.1 and gives a handy download link which won’t work because you have to install that by enabling the Application Server server role. I did this and accepted the default, minimum dependent bits that it asked for.

Later on I will need IIS 7 I could probably take them at this point and save a step later on. I also had to reboot to get pending changes installed before Exchange would install, so you can save another step by doing a reboot now.

I chose to install just the included languages and not the bundle. I don’t know what the difference is and don’t care right now.

It then copies some files locally and launches “phase 2” of the Exchange setup.

I chose the typical installation because I don’t know what the different Exchange roles do nor which I need.

I gave it an organization name of DevTest; left split permissions unticked (the default); left public folders unticked (default) as I don’t intend to have any Outlook 2003 clients. I also left the Client Access Server unticked as I don’t know what my external DNS entry might be at this point. I assume I can add this role later.

It then does a bunch of “readiness” checks. Some of these are due to pending server changes (from adding the Server Role) so I cancel the setup and reboot.

It also wants the current user to be in the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins groups, so it can mess with the Active Directory structure, so I add my user to those.

I rerun the install from the DVD and skip through phase 1 again then it copies files again and then tells me it found an earlier install, do I want to carry on with that, click Yes and it skips on to the readiness checks again.

It also needs Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Pack and some parts of the IIS 7 server role. I download the former and install the latter, choosing to only put on the specific IIS 7 role services that it wants (2 authentication services and both compression services). Again, this caused problems later – getting more of IIS 7 installed first would have saved me some steps below.

After a reboot I find 4 more Windows Updates so I let them come down and reboot again and restart the Exchange install again.

This time it goes through the checks OK and does the install. It took ~25 minutes. I gave it the server license key (from MSDN subscription) and rebooted then opened the newly-installed Exchange Management Console to have a look around.

Under Server Configuration > Client Access > SERVER NAME > Properties > General I can see the URL for OWA, but browsing here just gives me a blank, white page.

It turns out that there are a bunch of IIS 7 pre-requisites that the readiness checks don’t check (derp!). Note that you need import-module servermanager before add-windowsfeature will work.

That did it - OWA now works in the browser on the server and in the browser from a Windows 7 client. I’ve not tried an Outlook desktop client yet and the email will only work internally as I don’t have an external DNS entry.