After a wait of almost 24 hours – the download is available.
Yesterday, the Microsoft Exchange team announced the immediate availability of the Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate with this posting. However…. there was a complication… it wasn’t available!
As of a few minutes ago (1630 EST) the situation was resolved and you can now download the RC here.
A couple of quick notes about this release:
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This is the Enterprise edition of Exchange Server
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To use the DAG functionality, you’ll need the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server
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Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are both supported – but no version of Server 2003 or earlier version of Server 2008
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You will be able to upgrade to the released version of Exchange Server when it is released, but you CANNOT upgrade from Enterprise RC to Standard RTM
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You cannot install DAG (which uses Windows Failover Clustering) and NLB on the same server (this is a Windows restriction, not an Exchange restriction)
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This is an RC – that is, it is feature complete but may still have bugs.
There is a huge amount of additional functionality over Exchange Server 2007 – however, much of it is only available in the Exchange Management Shell. Since this release is feature complete, I don’t expect that to change prior to RTM.
Until next time…
If there are things you would like to see written about, please let me know!
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