Server 2008 and Exchange 2007, Part 1

My big current project at work right now is creating a new infrastructure for the holding company for my employer as I'll be heading up the umbrella organization's technology as well.

So far I've built 6 Windows 2008 Enterprise servers and have configured the domain architecture in Active Directory. The hardware is complete, including a tapeless-backup architecture.

This afternoon I've started constructing Exchange Server 2007 and it's quite interesting how many bits of it call for command line installation of the server components. I'm working off this document courtesy of Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691354(EXCHG.80).aspx

In that document the following bits are necessary to install via the command line (I'm sure you could tool around and do it through the GUI but I find it particularly interesting that MS recommends command line)...

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell

ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Digest-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression

ServerManagerCmd -i RPC-over-HTTP-proxy

By the way, don't follow my pasted commands explicitly unless you've already read the referenced MS document, it varies upon which roles your Exchange Server will be playing to determine which components get installed.

Any way you slice it, you need to do these items before you get to delve into the GUI. I'm wrapping up for tonight but resuming tomorrow afternoon on the GUI side so I'll report back with any interesting findings...