Planning Active Directory for Exchange 2013: PrepareSchema, PrepareAD and PrepareDomain

This post will describe the Active Directory preparation tasks required before installing Exchange 2013 into your domain.

My next post will actually walk through the steps of running the prepare commands you will need in order to install Exchange 2013 into your domain.  You should note that all of these commands can be run separately from the command line or you can simply have the GUI perform them automatically as part of the installation.

setup /PrepareSchema

PrepareSchema is the first command you will need to run in your domain.  You will need to have the following in place before this command will run:

• Must be a member of the Enterprise Admin and Schema Admin groups
• Must be run from a 64-bit machine in the same domain and site as the schema master
• Domain and Forest functional level must be at least Windows Server 2003 before installing Exchange 2013

This command will simply create the Schema objects within AD that are needed for Microsoft Exchange 2013.  There are a ton of objects created in your schema with this command so you may want to take the time to review the changes before implementing.

Exchange 2013 Active Directory Schema Changes

This command may feel destructive for some and you should know that it is irreversible but the risk is very low that it will actually cause issues in your domain.  A good analogy I recently heard regarding this change is that it is like adding a few columns to a spreadsheet.  No actual data is put in those columns until you run the setup /PrepareAD command.

setup /PrepareAD

PrepareAD is the second command required to be run in your domain and can only be run after prepSchema has completed and all changes have been replicated across all of your domain controllers.

This command simply adds the Microsoft Exchange container under the Services container in your Configuration partition within AD.  It will also require that you choose your Organization Name for Exchange and it will lay out the base framework in AD to begin adding the Exchange objects to the domain.

You will know this step has completed by checking Active Directory Users and Computers or ADAM for an OU named Microsoft Exchange Security Groups.

Again, you should wait until all replication completes between your DCs before moving on to the final prepare command.

setup /PrepareDomain

This command is only needed for sub-domains within your forest.  This will create similar objects as described in PrepareAD and will need to be run on all domains in the forest or can be triggered all at once by running setup /PrepareAllDomains from the root domain.

This command is required in all domains that will contain an installation of Exchange or contain mail enabled objects for your Exchange infrastructure.

For more detailed information regarding these changes please refer to the following technet article:

Prepare Active Directory and Domains for Exchange 2013

This concludes Planning Active Directory for Exchange 2013: PrepareSchema, PrepareAD and PrepareDomain

I hope this was helpful and informative to you and I would appreciate any feedback you may have.