Tutorials

In this guide, we come from a migration of Exchange Server 2007 to Exchange Server 2013 and now we will migrate the Exchange Server 2013 to the latest version, Exchange Server 2016. This is called a double hop migration.

At this point, we will introduce a new Windows Server 2016 that will be joined to the adatumcorp.local domain as a member server. On this server, we will install Exchange Server 2016 and continue the migration of Exchange data from the Exchange Server 2013 on the Windows Server 2012R2. I assume that the SBS 2008 (in the case of a migration from SBS 2008 to Windows Server 2016) is no longer active in your domain. You should have completed How to migrate from SBS 2003 R2 Premium to Windows Server 2016 (Essentials) after you completed How to migrate Exchange Server 2003 from SBS 2003 R2 to a new Exchange Server 2010 on Windows Server 2012R2

When the Exchange Server 2016 is installed and properly configured it can act as a downstream proxy for the Exchange Server 2013. The other way around is possible because Exchange Server 2013 can act as an upstream proxy, but best practice is that you connect to the highest version available. This way both Exchange Servers will coexist in the network. You can migrate mailboxes in batches. An Outlook client will connect to the highest version Exchange Server in our network, in our case the Exchange Server 2016, and if the mailbox for that user has not been migrated to the new server it will proxy the request.