Today will be a day long remembered, as it has seen the release of Exchange Server 2019. After the Ignite event in September, release of Exchange 2019 was more or less imminent. Well now it’s out there – on Volume License Center to be exact – and while most details were announced at Ignite as well, there have been some features which didn’t make it in part or entirely to RTM.
To start with formalities: The version number of Exchange 2019 RTM is 15.2.221.12. After preparing your Active Directory forest, the schema version is 17000, while the forest and domain versions will become 16751 and 13236 respectively.
Looking at the VL requirement as well as the dimensioning, it’s clear Exchange server 2019 is positioned as a product for enterprises; small to medium-sized business should aim for Office 365.
Highlights
A detailed summary of Ignite announcements on Exchange 2019 was published earlier here. To recap, some major highlights:
- Volume Licensing only, and no “Hybrid Server key”.
- FFL 2012R2 and later.
- Exchange Server 2019 on-premises is permanently branched from Exchange Online.
- MetaCache Database (MCDB) storage tiering with SSD’s for improved UX and mailbox density (+20%). Recommended ratio SSD:HDD is 1:3.
- Dynamic Database Cache to dynamically balance memory over active and passive copies cache.
- Big Funnel search technology leveraging mailbox database for availability.
- Supports up to 48 cores, recommended memory 128GB Mailbox/64GB Edge server roles to benefit scaling improvements. Maximum supported memory is 256GB.
- Requires Windows Server 2019, desktop or core.
- Requires .NET Framework 4.7.2, VC++ redistributable and UCMA (Mailbox only).
- Co-existence support with Exchange 2013 and 2016.
- UM role is gone.
Documentation
The official documentation can be found online on Docs here. For an overview of the sessions presented at Ignite on Exchange and related topics like calendaring, see here.
Notes
If you get a message when trying to install saying (desktop and core):
Setup can’t continue with the upgrade because the taskhostw (<PID>) has open files. Close the process, and then restart Setup. For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.ProcessNeedsToBeClosedOnUpgrade.aspx”
You can close the process with taskkill /f /pid <PID>.
Other articles
Other articles on the release of Exchange Server 2019:
- Exchange Server 2019 now available (Official announcement)
- Exchange 2019 released & available on Volume License Center (Jaap Wesselius)
- Exchange 2019 Server On-Premises Debuts (Tony Redmond)
Do make sure you read the release notes, which contains important information on potential issues.
In other news
The following products were also released today:
EighTwOne (821) 